TRANSIENT DETERMINATION ON THE BULK THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF SUB-MILLIMETER THIN FILMS OF COMPOSITE PHASE CHANGE THERMAL INTERFACIAL MATERIALS

The bulk thermal conductivity of thin films having a sub-millimeter thickness, made of composite phase change materials (PCM) and utilized as an emerging thermal interfacial material (TIM) for thermal management of electronics, was determined using the transient plane source (TPS) technique. The actual bulk thermal conductivity of the thin film samples was obtained by deconvoluting the thermal contact resistance (TCR) during the measurement process, according to the linear relationship between the nominal bulk thermal resistance and the thickness. The slope of the correlation curve is the reciprocal of film sample thermal conductivity and the intercept is the overall TCR. For the PCM35 thin film samples (which melt at around 35 degrees C) having three nominal thicknesses of 271 +/- 1 mu m, 460 +/- 2 gm and 511 +/- 2 mu m, the corrected results in the solid and liquid state were found to be approximately 0.487 W/m.K and 0.186 W/m.K, respectively. It was shown that the corrected values are greater than the direct readings from the TPS instrument as the latter involves the effect of TCR across multiple interfaces. The results obtained in this work could serve as reference property data for design of thermal management systems involving such phase change TIM.