Engineering Team Develops Heat-Conducting, Electric-Insulating Plastic

A multi-disciplinary team of MIT engineers developed a technique to convert polymer plastic from a non-thermal conducting material into a thermal conductor.
In another example of multi-disciplinary engineers producing a technology that could aid electrical systems, a group of mechanical and chemical engineers at MIT have converted a plastic material from a thermal insulator into a thermal conductor. This offers support for the idea that electrical engineering students should take basic courses in other engineering disciplines. It is becoming apparent that new technologies require inputs from multiple engineering sources.
The book Multidisciplinary Systems Engineering by J.A. Crowder, et. al describes the multi-disciplinary approaches to knowledge. As the book notes: “Multidisciplinary Engineering research literature clearly argues for the development of strategies that can transcend and bridge the knowledge of anyone given engineering discipline to another and engineers to enhance research collaboration between disciplines. Increasingly, cross and multi-domain research are more commonplace.”