Abstract
Phase change material (PCM)-based systems exhibit considerable potential for enhancing the thermal performance and operating reliability of electronic devices. However, under diverse environmental operating conditions, conventional approaches demonstrate inadequate adaptability to address dynamic thermal management demands. This study presents a magnetic field-based, contactless tuning strategy that dynamically regulates heat transfer performance through precisely controlling the mesoscale nanoparticle aggregation structures. By systematically varying the angular orientation of the aggregates relative to the primary heat flux direction, a 1.8-fold reduction on effective thermal resistance relative to the original composite PCM is achieved. Leveraging this tunable thermal resistance mechanism, a reconfigurable thermal management framework is developed. Compared to the performance without magnetic field regulation, a 10.8 °C mitigation of temperature excursions is demonstrated in electronic components under dynamic and intermittent loading conditions. These findings establish a scalable paradigm for addressing transient thermal challenges in high-performance electronic systems, particularly under extreme operational variability.
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Data availability
Source data are provided with this paper. All other data generated in this study, including additional characterization data and parametric study results, are provided in the Supplementary Information/Source data file. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The base code, based on Openlb used in this study is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6469606. Other software packages that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
Q.W. thanks support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 52130609). J.H. acknowledges the support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Basic Research Project (no. 524B2079).
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Q.W. and W.C. conceived, planned, and supervised this study. J.H. carried out formal analysis and wrote the original draft. L.Y. and A.M. provided some constructive thoughts of the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
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He, J., Yang, L., Wang, Q. et al. Dynamic thermal management under variable operating conditions through magnetic field control. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68715-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68715-7
