Mechanical properties and thermal conductivity of epoxy composites enhanced by h-BN/RGO and mh-BN/GO hybrid filler for microelectronics packaging application

Abstract

In recent years, significant interest has been focused on fabricating epoxy-based hybrid composite with a high thermal conductivity at optimum filler loading. As epoxy usually has a low thermal conductivity, the high intrinsic thermal conducting fillers such as h-BN, GO and RGO are incorporated. In this research, we report the epoxy-based hybrid composites with an enhanced thermal conductivity through silane-modified h-BN (mh-BN) with RGO. The sample containing 44.5 wt% (40 wt% mh-BN and 4.5 wt% RGO) hybrid filler exhibited the highest thermal conductivity (1.416 W/mK) which was 7 times that of pristine epoxy (0.21 W/mK). The thermal conductivities of RGO with unmodified h-BN (0.789 W/mK), GO with mh-BN (0.769 W/mK) and GO with unmodified h-BN (0.713) at 44.5 wt% loading are also reported. Comparison property studies of these above-mentioned four hybrid composites are described by lap shear strength, flexural strength, impact strength and thermogravimetric analysis. The fabricated hybrid composites exhibit outstanding performance in lap shear strength, thermal stability, and slightly reduced impact and flexural strength, which makes it as relevant for electronics packaging application such semiconductors, integrated circuit packaging, optoelectronics and also can attest potentiality in structural energy storage application. The atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy verified the surface roughness and morphology of two optimized compositions, i.e., mh-BN with RGO and h-BN with RGO with the epoxy matrix. Also, Maxwell, Hashin–Shtrikmann and series equations are used to verify the obtained experimental value.