Project idea
Many household and industrial applications, such as electronics, automotive equipment and communications devices, require effective thermal management or cooling systems to transfer away the heat generated by a device to enhance its performance, reliability and lifetime. Aluminum is a popular and widely-used thermal management material because of its favorable combination of high thermal conductivity (~200 W/m K), light weight (mass density 2.7 g/cm3), low cost, and easy processing. However, the advance of mobile electronics raises the demand for lightweight yet more efficient cooling components than the present aluminum-based components. In spite of great efforts in industry and academia to develop more advanced engineering materials, such as aluminum matrix composites and aluminum metal foams, it is still challenging to acquirenew materials that are lighter than aluminum while retain their thermal performance and easyprocessing merit. In this project we will develop scalable coating techniques to fabricate conformal graphene coatings on nonplanar aluminum substrates, and explore the feasibility to use the more thermally conductive (at the level of 1000 W/m K) and lighter (<2.0 g/cm3) graphene coatings toreplace a part of the aluminum and reduce the overall weight (by at least 20%) of the cooling components while retain comparable or even superior thermal performance to the original aluminum components. In particular, our coating technique can be readily integrated with the present manufacturing of aluminum products to shorten the development time.
If this project succeeds, the three partners will conduct a continued FoI project to further coatgraphene on the (shrunk) true aluminum heat spreaders and heat sinks of mobile electronics totest the thermal efficiency and validate the lightweight solution under simulated environment.With the increasing TRL, the graphene-coated aluminum has great potential to be commercializedas integrated lightweight cooling components in mobile electronics within 5-8 years.
