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Liquid metal/metal porous skeleton with high thermal conductivity and stable thermal reliability

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Abstract

New thermal interface materials (TIM) with liquid metal (LM) as the main component show many advantages in the field of thermal management. However, it is prone to leakage and causes electronic components to fail due to its fluidity, corrosiveness and difficulty in adsorption, thus limiting its applications. In this paper, based on the high thermal conductivity of LM, the composite material made of eutectic gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) and nickel-plated copper mesh (NPCM) was prepared, and the TIM with high thermal conductivity, stability and reliability was obtained. With surface plating, the plating on the copper surface achieves an area coverage of up to 97.7%, effectively preventing EGaIn corrosion. The complete wetting between materials can be achieved through surface modification of NPCM with an EGaIn oxide layer. The surface modification of NPCM with EGaIn oxide layer can achieve complete wetting between materials. The thermal conductivity of the composite is 26.4 W m−1 K−1. Compared to Nickel foams (NiF), NPCM/EGaIn composite exhibits a 22.4% increase in thermal conductivity. In addition, its thermal conductivity fluctuates in a range below 7 percent even after undergoing high-temperature aging and low-temperature cycling. The actual load test demonstrated that the use of EGaIn/NPCM resulted in an 18.0% reduction in CPU full load temperature and a 78.0% decrease in maximum throttling peak, as compared to conventional silicone grease.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the financial support from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No. 2022CDJQY-014) and 2022 Jiangsu Provincial Science and technology plan special fund BE2022110 (key research and development plan, industry prospect and key core technology).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Mechanical Transmission, College of Material Science and Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China

    Liming Tan, Jianbo Zhang & Jun Shen

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  1. Liming Tan
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  2. Jianbo Zhang
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Contributions

LT: data curation, investigation, methodology, validation, writing-original draft. JZ: conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, resources, writing-review & editing. JS: conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision, writing & review & editing.

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Correspondence to Jun Shen.

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Tan, L., Zhang, J. & Shen, J. Liquid metal/metal porous skeleton with high thermal conductivity and stable thermal reliability. J Mater Sci 58, 17829–17842 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-023-09159-y

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