Experimental study on a novel indium-based alloy thermal interface material with low contact thermal resistance

Abstract

In order to reduce its contact thermal resistance of high-power plug-in radio frequency (RF) components, a novel indium-based alloy is tested as thermal interface material. In the test, we record the temperature difference between the ends of the interface under different working conditions. The heat power range of each analog RF component is 40–80 W. Besides the novel indium-base alloy, thermal interface materials under different working conditions such as silicone based gel, indium foil and glass fiber gasket were measured for comparative analysis. Then the contact thermal resistance distributions of these thermal interface materials were obtained by fitting the curves with numerical simulation. The results indicated that the contact thermal resistance of the novel indium-based alloy thermal interface material is about 1 °C cm2/W, which is reduced by 60% and 68% respectively compared with glass fiber gasket and indium foil. Finally we performed multiple insertion and extraction of indium-based alloy thermal interface materials, it is found that the temperature difference between the ends of the interface changes within 7%, which means it has good plugging performance for disassembling and maintenance.