Graphene-based lightweight material for electronics cooling

Important results from the project

The project goal is to develop a “scalable” process to fabricate graphene coatings on aluminum substrates and use the more conductive and lighter graphene coatings to replace a part of the aluminum to reduce the overall weight (by at least 20%) of the cooling components (such as heat spreaders and heat sinks) and meanwhile retain comparable thermal performance to the original (pure) aluminum components.

Expected long term effects

We have developed a reliable graphene coating process where the coating thickness can reach millimeter level. The graphene-coated thin aluminum plates attain similar thermal conductance to the thick aluminum plates, but its weight is 22% lighter than the latter. The graphene-coated aluminum has great potential to provide lighter solutions than the presently widely-used aluminum (alloys) for thermal management in various industrial applications, such as electronics and communication technology.

Approach and implementation

A supersonic spraying process has been developed to directly spray graphene inks on various substrates to form millimeter-level-thick thermally-conductive thick graphene coatings. Comparative studies were carried out to test the thermal performance where the graphene-coated thin aluminum plates and the reference samples (pure thick aluminum plates) were heated under the same environment and their temperature distribution was analyzed to compare the thermal performance.