MIT develops cooling technology by polyethylene

Bangalore: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a technology to turn the most common polymer, polyethylene, into a material that conducts heat just as well as most metals while retaining its properties as an electrical insulator.

Other special property of this transformed polyethylene is that it conducts heat very efficiently in just one direction, which makes it highly suitable for cooling a computer chip. The researchers at MIT developed this technology by getting the polymer's molecules to line up in the same direction, instead of having them randomly arranged.

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This arrangement was done by slowly drawing a polyethylene fiber from a solution using the cantilever of an atomic force microscope. Experts believe that the product was 300 times more thermally conductive than run-of-the-mill polyethylene along the realigned molecules.