As the integration of devices in electronics manufacturing increases, there is a growing demand for thermal interface materials (TIMs) with high through-plane thermal conductivity. Vertically aligned carbon fiber (CF) thermally conductive composites have received considerable attention from researchers. However, the presence of significant interfacial thermal resistance at the interface between CFs and polymer presented a significant challenge to achieving the desired thermal conductivity, even in highly vertically aligned structures. Here, in addition to developing a polymer-based thermally conductive composite based on highly oriented CFs, we employed the Diels–Alder reaction to enhance the interfacial bonding between the CFs and the polymer matrix. Notably, we proposed the thermal conductivity enhancing mechanism of the highly oriented CFs filled silicone rubber (SR) composite originated from the strengthened interfacial bonding. The results indicated that the Diels–Alder reaction facilitated an increase in the thermal conductivity of the composite from 17.69 Wm− 1 K− 1 to 21.50 Wm− 1 K− 1 with a CF loading of 71.4 wt%. Additionally, a novel nano-indentation test was employed to analyse the interfacial strengthening of composites. Our research have significant implications for the advancement of thermal management in the field of electronics and energy, particularly with regard to the development of high-performance thermally conductive composites.

A force-free field (FFF) is determined solely by the normal components of magnetic field and current density on the entire boundary of the domain. Methods employing three components of magnetic field suffer from overspecification of boundary conditions and/or a nonzero divergence-B problem. A vector potential formulation eliminates the latter issue, but introduces difficulties in imposing the normal component of current density at the boundary. This paper proposes four different boundary treatment methods within the vector potential formulation. We conduct a comparative analysis of the vector potential FFF solvers that we have developed incorporating these methods against other FFF codes in different magnetic field representations. Although the vector potential solvers with the new boundary treatments do not outperform our poloidal-toroidal formulation code, they demonstrate comparable or superior performance compared to the optimization code in SolarSoftWare. The methods developed here are expected to be readily applied not only to force-free field computations but also to time-dependent data-driven simulations.