Development of Nanostructured-based Composites as Advanced Thermal Interface Materials

Abstract

Thermal management is one of the most critical issues in electronics due to increasing power densities. This problem is getting even worse for small and sophisticated devices due to air gaps present between the heat source and heat sink. Thermal interface materials (TIM) are used to reduce the air gaps and significantly increase the heat transfer capability of the system. A high-thermal-performance, cost-effective and reliable TIM would be needed to dissipate the generated heat, which could enable significant reductions in weight, volume and cost of the thermal management system. In this study a number of different nanostructured materials are reviewed for potential use as a filler material in our effort to develop advanced TIM composite. Some of the candidate filler materials considered is Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene and Few Layer Graphene (FLG), Boron Nitride Nanotubes (BNNT) and Boron Nitride Nanomesh (BNNM) and Boron Arsenide (BAs). Objective is to identify composition of boron arsenide as filler in polymer-nanostructured material composite TIM for high heat flux applications. In order to design boron-arsenide-based TIM composite with enhanced effective thermal conductivity, a number of metallic and nonmetallic base-filler material composites are considered with varying filler fractions. Empirical mixture models based on effective medium theories (EMT) are evaluated for estimating effective conductivity of the two-component boron arsenide-filler composite TIM structure.