Abrasion of Graphene-Enhanced Thermal Interface Materials for Electronics Thermal Management Applications

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Recent advances in materials science have shown that solid-state thermal interface materials (TIM) enhanced with graphene are becoming a viable substitute to thermal pastes and phase change materials (PCM) in electronics packaging with high power densities. Such graphene-enhanced TIM (GT-TIM) can ex-hibit comparable or lower thermal impedance than their thermal pastes and PCM counterparts, yet do not degrade under high heat flux. This makes them interesting for several applications, especially data centers and cloud computing. However, graphene has very high electric conductivity, thus increasing the risk of short circuits due to the release of graphene particle residues during handling, installation, or repeated use. Before becoming a viable alternative to high-power electronics in the industrial sector, the problem of potential short-circuiting must be resolved. In this paper, we investigated the release of particle residues from untreated and surface-coated GT-TIM by employing a unique abrasion method in which samples were abraded at a constant rate with constant applied pressure. The results show that the amount of particle residues released from the GT-TIM correlates to the pressure used for the TIM assembly and that surface coatings can significantly reduce the release of abraded particles at applied pressures at 12 kPa or lower. This work provides an insight into design considerations for a bonding/assembly/packaging process of the unique GT-TIM, enabling findings of optimum design and packaging conditions of using them for addressing the high-performance dissipation of novel and large power electronics systems.