The continued miniaturization and proliferation of electronics is met with significant thermal management challenges. Decreased size, increased power densities, and diverse operating environments challenge the limitations of conventional thermal management schemes and materials. To enable the continuation of these trends thermal interface materials (TIMs) that are used to enhance heat conduction and provide stress relief between adjacent layers in a electronic package must be improved. Forests comprised of nominally vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), having outstanding thermal and mechanical properties, are excellent candidates for next-generation thermal interface materials (TIMs). However, despite nearly a decade of research, TIMs based on vertically aligned CNT forests have yet to harness effectively the high thermal conductivity of individual CNTs. One of the key obstacles that has limited the performance of CNT TIMs is the presence of high thermal contact resistances between the CNT free ends and the surfaces comprising the interface. The aim of this research is to better understand the mechanisms by which the thermal contact resistance of CNT forest thermal interfaces can be reduced and to use this understanding towards the design of effective and to scalable processing methods. Contact area and weak bonding between the CNT tips and opposing surface are identified as factors that contribute significantly to the thermal contact resistance. Three strategies are explored that utilize these mechanisms as instruments for reducing the contact resistance; i) liquid softening, ii) bonding with surface modifiers, and iii) bonding with nanoscale polymer coatings. All three strategies are found to reduce the thermal contact resistance at the CNT forest tips to below 1 mm2-K/W, a value to where it is no longer the factor limiting heat conduction in CNT forest TIMs. These strategies are also relatively low-cost and amenable to scaling for production when compared to existing metal-based bonding strategies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/54853 |
| Date | 27 May 2016 |
| Creators | Taphouse, John Harold |
| Contributors | Cola, Baratunde A., Graham, Samuel |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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