Near-Theoretical Thermal Conductivity Silver Nanoflakes as Reinforcements in Gap-Filling Adhesives.

Abstract

The rapid development of highly integrated microelectronic devices causes urgent demands for advanced thermally conductive adhesives (TCAs) to solve the interfacial heat-transfer issue. Due to their natural 2D structure and isotropic thermal conductivity, metal nanoflakes are promising fillers blended with polymer to develop high-performance TCAs. However, achieving corresponding TCAs with thermal conductivity over 10 W m^-1 K^-1 at filler content below 30 vol% remains challenging so far. This longstanding bottleneck is mainly attributed to the fact that most current metal nanoflakes are prepared by "bottom-up" processes (e.g., solution-based chemical synthesis) and inevitably contain lattice defects or impurities, resulting in lower intrinsic thermal conductivities, only 20-65% of the theoretical value. Here, a "top-down" strategy by splitting highly purified Ag foil with nanoscale thickness is adopted to prepare 2D Ag nanoflakes with an intrinsic thermal conductivity of 398.2 W m^-1 K^-1 , reaching 93% of the theoretical value. After directly blending with epoxy, the resultant Ag/epoxy exhibits a thermal conductivity of 15.1 W m^-1 K^-1 at low filler content of 18.6 vol%. Additionally, in practical microelectronic cooling performance evaluations, the interfacial heat-transfer efficiency of the Ag/epoxy achieves ≈1.4 times that of the state-of-the-art commercial TCA.