Enhancement of Ga - 21.5 In - 10 Sn Eutectic Alloy Based Thermal Interface Material Incorporating Cu Flake

Thermal interface materials (TIMs) are noticed as a promising solution for heat dissipation for electronic devices. The most common types of TIMs are silicon-based materials. However, due to the low thermal conductivity value of silicon material, silicon-based TIMs have a weakness in the effectiveness of heat dissipation. Recently, gallium-based alloys have been noticed as an alternative to commercial TIMs. Gallium-based materials are suitable for TIM due to their high thermal conductivity, fluidic characteristics, and surface wettability. Early Gallium-based liquid metal TIM consisted of 99% gallium with thermal conductivity of 13.07 Wm
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. Ga-In binary and Ga-In-Sn ternary alloys have higher thermal conductivity than pure Ga. In addition to the change of composition of alloys, some studies added fillers in the matrix. In this study, we have chosen Ga - 21.5 In -10.0 Sn eutectic alloy (Galinstan) as the base material due to its high thermal conductivity value. To increase the thermal conductivity of Galinstan TIM, we have added Cu flake weight percent of 3 wt%, 5 wt%, and 7 wt%. We pretreated Cu flake to prevent oxidation and obtained composite TIM. The thermal conductivity of the Cu-Galinstan composite material was measured by the ASTM D5470 method, and the thermal properties of each composition were analyzed through DSC. To investigate the effectivity of Cu-Galinstan composite material, we measured the temperature of the Cu/Cu-Galinstan composite material/Cu structure.