Engineering Metal-Polymer Interface for Enhanced Heat Transfer

Engineering the heat conduction across interfaces in solid materials is essential for many applications, ranging from thermal management of electronics to power generation. Especially when the system dimensions are down to nanoscale, the major thermal resistance arises at the interfaces and brings a tremendous impact on the performance of nanodevices. It is of furthermost interest to explore fundamental mechanisms of the interfacial heat transfer and to enable optimization of the interfacial thermal properties towards tailoring thermal resistance for target applications. The project focuses on the heat transfer across metal and polymer interfaces in flexible electronics, aiming for understanding and characterizing the thermal boundary conductance to enhance the heat dissipation and thus to improve the device efficiency. The total package of renewed thinking of thermal transport through fundamental understanding, atomistic modeling and comprehensive experiment will lead to a practical solution of controlling and tuning the interface thermal transport. The project has experimentally built up 3-omega setup for thermoelectric measurement of multilayered structures at NTNU, and extended frequency domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) for ultra-thin metal-polymer multilayers at ICN2, Barcelona, Spain. Computationally the atomistic and molecular models of metal, polymer, and their combination systems have been constructed, and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics has been employed to understand the heat transfer across the interface. The intrinsic thermal boundary conductance of hybrid semicrystalline polymer has been revealed, and the effect of influencing factors on the heat transfer in copper has been disclosed.

The project has experimentally built up 3-omega setup for thermoelectric measurement of multilayered structures at NTNU, and extended frequency domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) for ultra-thin metal-polymer multilayers at ICN2, Barcelona, Spain. Computationally the atomistic and molecular models of metal, polymer, and their combination systems have been constructed, and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics has been employed to understand the heat transfer across the interface. The intrinsic thermal boundary conductance of hybrid semicrystalline polymer has been revealed, and the effect of influencing factors on the heat transfer in copper has been disclosed.

Engineering the heat conduction across interfaces in solid materials is essential for a number of applications, ranging from thermal management of electronics to power generation. When the system dimensions are down to nanoscale, the major thermal resistance arises at the interfaces and this can have a tremendous impact on the thermal performance of nanodevices. Thus it is of furthermost interest to explore fundamental understanding of the interfacial heat transfer mechanisms and enable the ability to optimize the interfacial thermal properties. The proposed project is aiming for a thorough investigation on the heat transfer across metal and polymer interfaces in general, in particular targeting the use of conductive adhesives as a metal-polymer composite in electronic packaging technology. A novel adhesive based on metal-coated polymer particles will be used as a model system in both experimental and simulation work, due to the ease of modifying and characterizing the conductive particles. Quantifying the effect of morphology, interaction between metal and polymer, phonon band structure will explore the interfacial heat transfer mechanisms in molecular scale. Modification to the interfaces will be investigated with the aim of being able to engineer the interfacial thermal properties. The comprehensive experimental work will be performed to characterize the interfacial thermal properties and link it to the bulk heat transfer in the conductive adhesives. Computational simulations of thermal transport will be carried out to complement the experiment and develop a molecular dynamics based model for prediction and modification of interfacial thermal properties from its atomic and molecular structure. The total package of renewed thinking of thermal transport through fundamental understanding, modeling and experimental investigation will lead to a solution of controlling and tuning interfacial heat transfer.