Designs of conductive polymer composites with exceptional reproducibility of positive temperature coefficient effect: A review

Conductive polymer composites with positive temperature coefficient (PTC) effect have gained intensive attention for the potential application in the smart heating field. The PTC reproducibility is significantly essential to guarantee the security and utility of PTC composites. Regrettably, during the repeated temperature cycles, the irreversible self-aggregation of conductive filler and the random reconstruction of conductive network lead to unsatisfactory performance of PTC reproducibility. Extensive efforts have been conducted to address this issue by strategies, including modification of fillers, cross-linking of a polymer matrix, hybrids of fillers, and application of binary polymer matrix. Nevertheless, there are very limited reviews about this issue. In this review, the recent advances in fabricating PTC composites with the enhanced PTC reproducibility have been systematically summarized. Meanwhile, the current challenges and future prospects of PTC composite are also presented. We hope that this review will provide some inspirations for designing PTC materials of long-term performance for commercial applications.