Abstract
The substantial heat generation in highly dense electronic devices requires the use of materials tailored to facilitate efficient thermal management. The design of such materials may be based on the loading of thermally conductive fillers into the polymer matrix applied – as a thermal interface material – on the interface between two surfaces to reduce contact resistance. On the one hand, these additives enhance the thermal conductivity of the composite, but on the other hand, they increase the viscosity of the composite and hence impair its workability. This in turn could negatively affect the device–matrix interface. To address this problem, we suggest a tunable composite material comprising a combination of two different carbon-based fillers, graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) and graphite. By adjusting the GNP:graphite concentration ratio and the total concentration of the fillers, we were able to fine tune the thermal conductivity and the workability of the hybrid polymer composite. To facilitate the optimal design of materials for thermal management, we constructed a ‘concentration–thermal conductivity–viscosity phase diagram’. This hybrid approach thus offers solutions for thermal management applications, providing both finely tuned composite thermal properties and workability. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by fabricating a thermal interface material with tunable workability and testing it in a model electronic device.
Highlights
Modern-day miniaturization of electronic devices [1] goes hand in hand with the demand for increased performance, which, in turn, leads to high-power consumption and to substantial heat generation
We explore how the workability of a filled matrix can be controlled by using a combination of two fillers, namely, graphite and graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs), and compare the workability and thermal conductivity (TC) values to those obtained for a single-filler and hybrid composites
The thermal conductivity and rheological properties of single-filler composites will be characterized. This will be followed by a study of hybrid composites, highlighting the implications of the rheological properties on thermal management applications
Summary
Modern-day miniaturization of electronic devices [1] goes hand in hand with the demand for increased performance, which, in turn, leads to high-power consumption and to substantial heat generation. In a previous study [41] we have demonstrated that by loading a polymer matrix with two fillers, namely, GNP and graphite, it is possible to produce composite with highly tunable rheological properties for thermal management applications [42,43,44,45]. For composites loaded with a single filler (either GNP or graphite), the TC shows a linear dependence with the volume fraction of the filler ( Filler, Figure 2a).
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