Direct Printing of Thermal Management Device Using Low‐Cost Composite Ink

Abstract

This work presents a new method for fabricating thermal devices, such as heat sinks, using a 3D printing technique and lightweight composite ink. The method focuses on formulating composite inks with desired properties and direct ink writing for manufacturing. The ink undergoes two phases: phase one uses low viscosity epoxy to provide viscoelastic properties and phase two provides the fillers consisting of carbon fiber and graphite nanoplatelets to provide high thermal conductivity and structural properties. By combining these functional materials, 3D structures with a high thermal conductivity (≈2 W m−1 K−1) are printed for thermal management applications with the storage modulus of 3000 MPa and a density only 1.24 g cm−3. The results show that by carefully tailoring functional properties of the ink, net‐shape multifunctional structures can be directly printed for thermal management device applications, such as heat sinks.