Preparation and characterization of thermally conductive adhesive based on epoxy and modified nanofillers

Abstract

In modern-day electronics, conductive adhesives are now considered as valuable and low-cost asset for consumer electronic products, enabling a host of applications for thermal sensors. Moreover, conductive newlineadhesive reduces the health hazard associated with traditional Pb/Sn solder technique. Nevertheless, introduction of polymers in conductive adhesives resulted in a number of reliability issues such as release of emitting gases, Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) mismatch, and related thermal stresses that have to be addressed by polymer experts and engineers for well-functioning of the electronic devices. Epoxy resins have been widely used as a common interface material for electronic packaging due to their wide acceptability of different fillers. Epoxy-based materials, have contributed to its wide use in engineering applications due to their outstanding thermal and mechanical properties as well as good processability. The present work has been broadly classified into three steps. In the first step, an effort has been made to develop a new type of complex conductive adhesive filled with silver decorated Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (Ag-MWCNT). MWCNTs were chemically modified and silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) have been homogeneously decorated against the MWCNT surfaces. Various characterization studies such as, Fourier newlineTransform Infra-Red (FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Energy-Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) have been used to investigate the functionalization of MWCNTs. Further, the thermal conductivity of different epoxy adhesive systems was measured using guarded heat flow method newline newline