Thermally Conductive Plastics for Enhanced Thermal Management

摘要

Electronic devices continue to shrink while continuing to offer increasing functionality. This trend poses a significant challenge to design engineers who need to adequately address the increasing thermal management requirements of these devices on a shrinking footprint. Thermally conductive plastics have been gaining attention as an innovative new material option to address this challenge. While plastics are typically poor conductors of heat, it is possible to increase the thermal conductivity with the use of certain additives. Unique ceramic additives like boron nitride offer the added advantage of enabling thermally conductive plastic formulations that are also electrically insulating. The replacement of aluminum heat sinks in free (natural) convection environments with thermally conductive plastics is discussed in this paper. The results show it may indeed be possible to replace aluminum with thermally conductive plastic heat sinks in convection limited environments, and if judicious redesign of the plastic heat sink is incorporated, an improved thermal management solution can be realized. Additionally, the benefits of enhancing existing plastic housings to enable an improved thermal management solution are discussed. The results also show that modest enhancements to the thermal conductivity of existing plastic housings can yield significant improvements to the overall thermal management solution as well.