Dr. Jag Kasichainula, an Associate Professor of materials science and engineering at the North Carolina State University, has designed a low-cost, highlyefficient cooling technique using graphene composite films that will help dissipate heat from electronic devices.
This novel technique is especially useful to cool devices that produce a large amount of heat, including power devices and lasers. In this technique, heat is dissipated from an electronic device using a copper-graphene composite-made ‘heat spreader,’ which is bonded to the device utilizing an indium-graphene interface film.
Dr. Kasichainula has reported his technique in a paper titled ‘Thermal Conductivity of Copper-Graphene Composite Films Synthesized by Electrochemical Deposition with Exfoliated Graphene Platelets’ in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B. The National Science Foundation funded the research work.
Dr. Kasichainula informed that since the thermal conductivity of both the indium-graphene and copper-graphene films is high, the device can be cooled effectively. The rate of heat conduction by a material is termed as thermal conductivity. Indeed, Dr. Kasichainula discovered that the thermal conductivity of the copper-graphene film enables cooling of the film at a rate around 25% quicker than pure copper, which is being currently used by most devices.
The reliability of an electronic device gets affected when it becomes too hot. Hence, it is necessary to dissipate heat from the device. With the help of an electrochemical deposition technique, it is possible to synthesize the copper-graphene composite. The paper discusses the manufacturing technique for the same. . Dr. Kasichainula stated that the copper-graphene composite is less expensive and can be produced easily. Copper is an expensive material, so the addition of graphene as a replacement for copper eventually reduces the overall cost, he added.
Source: http://www.ncsu.edu