Thermal management schemes can get more complicated as devices get smaller. A material like this, which could also offer higher reliability, could be attractive for addressing thermal management issues. This material could ultimately allow us to design electronic systems in different ways.

—Baratunde Cola, corresponding author and assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech

The project, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, involved researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, and the Raytheon Company. Virendra Singh, a research scientist in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Thomas Bougher, a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School, are the paper’s co-first authors.

Although heat transfer in amorphous polymer materials can be improved by creating aligned crystalline structures in the polymers, those structures—formed through a fiber drawing processes—can leave the material brittle and easily fractured as devices expand and contract during heating and cooling cycles.

The new interface material is produced from a conjugated polymer, polythiophene, in which aligned polymer chains in nanofibers facilitate the transfer of phonons—but without the brittleness associated with crystalline structures. Formation of the nanofibers produces an amorphous material with thermal conductivity of up to ~4.4 W m^–1 K^–1at room temperature. This enhancement, the researchers suggest, results from significant molecular chain orientation along the fibre axis that is obtained during electropolymerization using nanoscale templates.

The material has been tested up to 200 °C, a temperature that could make it useful for applications in vehicles. Solder materials have been used for thermal interfaces between chips and heat sinks, but may not be reliable when operated close to their reflow temperatures.

Polymers aren’t typically thought of for these applications because they normally degrade at such a low temperature. But these conjugated polymers are already used in solar cells and electronic devices, and can also work as thermal materials. We are taking advantage of the fact that they have a higher thermal stability because the bonding is stronger than in typical polymers.

—Baratunde Cola

The structures are grown in a multi-step process that begins with an alumina template containing tiny pores covered by an electrolyte containing monomer precursors. When an electrical potential is applied to the template, electrodes at the base of each pore attract the monomers and begin forming hollow nanofibers. The amount of current applied and the growth time control the length of the fibers and the thickness of their walls, while the pore size controls the diameter. Fiber diameters range from 18 to 300 nanometers, depending on the pore template.

After formation of the monomer chains, the nanofibers are cross-linked with an electropolymerization process, and the template removed. The resulting structure can be attached to electronic devices through the application of a liquid such as water or a solvent, which spreads the fibers and creates adhesion through capillary action and van der Waals forces.

With the electrochemical polymerization processing approach that we took, we were able to align the chains of the polymer, and the template appears to prevent the chains from folding into crystals so the material remained amorphous. Even though our material is amorphous from a crystalline standpoint, the polymer chains are highly aligned—about 40% in some of our samples.

—Baratunde Cola

Though the technique still requires further development and is not fully understood theoretically, Cola believes it could be scaled up for manufacturing and commercialization. The new material could allow reliable thermal interfaces as thin as three microns, compared to as much as 50 to 75 microns with conventional materials.

Engineers have been searching for an improved thermal interface material that could help remove heat from electronic devices. The problem of removing heat has worsened as devices have gotten both smaller and more powerful.

Rather than pursue materials because of their high thermal conductivity, Cola and his collaborators investigated materials that could provide higher levels of contact in the interface. In some of the best thermal interface materials, less than 1% of the material was actually making contact.

I stopped thinking so much about the thermal conductivity of the materials and started thinking about what kinds of materials make really good contact in an interface.

—Baratunde Cola

Cola decided to pursue polythiophene materials after reading a paper describing a “gecko foot” application in which the material provided an estimated 80% contact.

Samples of the material have been tested to 200 °C through 80 thermal cycles without any detectable difference in performance. While further work will be necessary to understand the mechanism, Cola believes the robustness results from adhesion of the polymer rather than a bonding.

Other co-authors of the paper included Professor Kenneth Sandhage, Research Scientist Ye Cai, Assistant Professor Asegun Henry and graduate assistant Wei Lv of Georgia Tech; Prof. Li Shi, Annie Weathers, Kedong Bi, Micheal T. Pettes and Sally McMenamin in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin; and Daniel P. Resler, Todd Gattuso and David Altman of the Raytheon Company.

A patent application has been filed on the material. Cola has formed a startup company, Carbice Nanotechnologies, to commercialize thermal interface technologies. It is a member of Georgia Tech's VentureLab program.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through award CBET-113071, a seed grant from the Georgia Tech Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics and an NSF-IGERT graduate fellowship.

Resources

• Virenda Singh, et al. (2014) “High thermal conductivity of chain-oriented amorphous polythiophene,” Nature Nanotechnology, doi: 10.1038/nnano.2014.44