Screen-printed nanostructured composites as thermal interface materials for insulated gate bipolar transistors heat dissipation applications

Thermal interface materials (TIMs) are of crucial importance in enhancing heat transfer and minimizing exceedingly high temperatures in high-density electronics. TIMs functionally aim to reduce the microscale crevices by penetrating the gap between the contacting rigid surfaces. We prepared silver nanoparticles (SNPs) and single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs)-based nanocomposites with graphite nanoplatelets (GNPs) by using a screen printing technique for conformal spreading of SNPs and SWCNTs with various weight-loading ratios on top of a layer containing the GNPs and measured its thermal conductivity and electrical conductivities in both through-plane and in-plane directions. In particular, the 10% SNPs enhanced TIMs showed highly anisotropic behavior in both electrical and thermal conductivities, viz., in-plane electrical conductivity exceeds its through-plane counterpart by three orders of magnitude, the highest in-plane electrical conductivity was 7.85 S/cm, and through-plane electrical conductivity was 0.00287 S/cm. Similarly, anisotropic behavior was found for the in-plane thermal conductivity ∼8.4 W/mK and through-plane thermal conductivity ∼0.35943 W/mK. In addition, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was performed to reveal the typical morphology and elements' existence of screen-printed TIMs. The proposed TIMs were put into the actual 15-kW converter to test the thermal management performance.