Abstract
Vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays are promising candidates for advanced thermal interface materials (TIMs) since they possess high mechanical compliance and high intrinsic thermal conductivity. Some of the previous works indicate that the CNT arrays in direct dry contact with the target surface possess low contact thermal conductance, which is the dominant thermal resistance. Using a phase sensitive transient thermo-reflectance (PSTTR) technique, we measure the thermal conductance between CNT arrays and copper (Cu) surfaces under different pressures. The experiments demonstrated that the contact force is one of the crucial factors for optimizing the thermal performance of CNT array-based TIMs. The experimental results suggest that the Cu-CNT arrays’ contact thermal conductance has a strong dependence on the surface deformation and has an order of magnitude rise as the contact pressure increases from 0.05 to 0.15 MPa. However, further increase of the contact pressure beyond 0.15 MPa has little effect on the contact thermal resistance. This work could provide guidelines to determine the minimum requirement of packaging pressure on CNT TIMs.
Highlights
With rapidly increasing power densities in electronic devices, thermal management is becoming a crucial issue in maintaining the reliability and performance
We investigated the effect of contact pressure on the performance of carbon nanotube arrays thermal interface material
carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays with two different heights were both measured for contact thermal conductance by phase sensitive transient thermo-reflectance method under different loads
Summary
With rapidly increasing power densities in electronic devices, thermal management is becoming a crucial issue in maintaining the reliability and performance. One way to improve the heat dispassion of devices is to find ultrahigh thermal conductivity materials for chips and heat sinks. Possess a thermal conductivity between 294–390 W/mK, and are excellent materials for heat sinks [2]. A lot of effort has been put into searching for advanced thermal interface materials (TIMs) to enhance thermal conduction between chips and heat sinks. Aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays are promising candidates for advanced TIMs since they possess high mechanical compliance [4,5,6,7,8] and high thermal conductivity at room temperature range [9,10,11,12,13]
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