Particle Arrangement Design for Predicting the Percolation Threshold of Silver/Epoxy Composite for Electrically Conductive Adhesive Application

Abstract

The early use of electrically conductive adhesives (ECAs) provided an alternative to solder because of their several advantages, such as good electrical conductivity, low cost, extendability to fine pitch of interconnecting material and environmental friendliness. According to previous works, an optimal particle volume fraction became a major objective of many researchers in order to obtain highly conductive ECAs, realizing that the need for transitions from an insulator to a conductor is controlled by the geometric arrangement of particles. In the current study, particle arrangement models of ECAs are developed by establishing the effects of van der Waals’ attraction energy and particle motion, which act as a kind of particle interaction to generate a conducting structure. The methodology is divided into three major parts: the formulation of a particle arrangement technique, and numerical and experimental studies. The formulation of particle arrangement is developed in an epoxy colloidal system. During verification, the particle arrangement model is validated by the theoretical fractal dimension and guided by a morphological study of the experimental assessments. The model was simulated through representative volume elements with the volume fraction factor, which was set in the range of 2–8 vol.%, while electrical conductivity was an observed parameter. The numerical results showed good agreement with the experiments in which the percolation threshold occurred between 4 and 6% of the volume of filler loading.