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Direct Printing of Thermal Management Device Using Low‐Cost Composite Ink
Author(s) -
Nguyen Nam,
Melamed Eric,
Park Jin Gyu,
Zhang Songlin,
Hao Ayou,
Liang Richard
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
macromolecular materials and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.913
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1439-2054
pISSN - 1438-7492
DOI - 10.1002/mame.201700135
Subject(s) - materials science , composite material , thermal conductivity , composite number , inkwell , epoxy , 3d printing , graphite , thermal , dynamic mechanical analysis , polymer , physics , meteorology
This work presents a new method for fabricating thermal devices, such as heat sinks, using a 3D printing technique and lightweight composite ink. The method focuses on formulating composite inks with desired properties and direct ink writing for manufacturing. The ink undergoes two phases: phase one uses low viscosity epoxy to provide viscoelastic properties and phase two provides the fillers consisting of carbon fiber and graphite nanoplatelets to provide high thermal conductivity and structural properties. By combining these functional materials, 3D structures with a high thermal conductivity (≈2 W m −1 K −1 ) are printed for thermal management applications with the storage modulus of 3000 MPa and a density only 1.24 g cm −3 . The results show that by carefully tailoring functional properties of the ink, net‐shape multifunctional structures can be directly printed for thermal management device applications, such as heat sinks.