Mechanical engineering major Brendan Scott isn't taking the summer off with other University of Massachusetts Amherst students this year.
But he says he's having a blast.
NASA has granted him a $6,000 undergraduate fellowship to study how polymer insulators could be turned into heat conductors. He could be considered a fish out of water — a mechanical engineer in the midst of an almost-alchemic effort to transmute matter.
Scott, who plans to graduate in December from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said he is focusing on low density polyethylene, in combination with graphite, in part for its potential weight savings as a thermal conductor.
The advantage of thermally conductive polymers "would be very broad," Scott said recently by phone from Amherst. "It would impact almost everything: automotive, aerospace, large machinery, thermal management and weight management."
And demand for such materials is growing, fueled by the shift toward electric cars and ever-smaller electronics, he noted.
A market study published in March by Coherent Market Insights Pvt. Ltd. of Burlingame, Calif., and Pune, India, predicts the market for thermally conductive polymers — valued at $136.9 million in 2022 — will reach $366.4 million by 2030, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 13.1 percent.
The study attributes much of the anticipated increase to the growing automotive, aerospace and electronics industries. As challenges, however, the study cites the price of raw materials, low durability and readily available alternative materials.
Scott, who is from Milton, Mass., near Boston, is particularly interested in potential applications for space. Many space missions involve bringing back rocks: "Rocks are heavy," he noted. He was encouraged to apply for the NASA fellowship by his faculty mentor, Yanfei Xu, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in UMass Amherst's College of Engineering.
As part of the research into turning polymer insulators into heat conductors, Xu will help Scott investigate interfacial thermal transport between polymers and fillers in polymer composites.
"Thermal transport properties [in this area] … are not well understood," he said. "We don't have a good model of how they work alone or with other polymers. What I'm working on, on its own, is one tiny, very specific piece of information" that could be part of a huge step forward.
Uses include "air conditioning units, chargers, laptops, computers, phones — pretty much every single thing that gets too hot."
"It's pretty much a no-brainer to use these in a large-scale way," he noted. Highly conductive polymers would have the beneficial properties of regular polymers — machineability, corrosion resistance, the ability to make complex shapes — while competing materials such as metals and ceramics can be dense, expensive and hard to work with.
Another space-related application Scott and Xu are exploring involves astronauts' clothing.
"When the astronauts go to space, they want to wear wearable, flexible, lighter-weight clothes," Xu said in a university news release about the fellowship.
"When they do a spacewalk, how can a space suit keep the astronaut as cool or as warm or as comfortable as possible? Clearly, we are aware of polymer-based materials, which have unique properties including being lighter weight, wearable, flexible and comfortable."
The fellowship was awarded by the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium, part of NASA's National Space Grant College and Fellowship Project.