Numerical approach to characterization of thermally conductive adhesives

Thermally conductive adhesives (TCA) and electrically conductive adhesives (ECA) are one of the major concerns of the contemporary micro-electronics. They are especially important in application where e.g. effective heat dissipation is the key factor for reliability issues. Currently there is a lot of ongoing research in order to improve the basic thermal property of adhesives, which is mainly heat conductance. According to the literature data the heat conductance can vary from 0.1 up to 60 W/m·K. It depends not only on the filler material, its content and configuration but also on thermo-mechanical properties of matrix. On the other hand numerical simulation becomes nowadays an inevitable tool for rapid non-destructive and low-cost experiments. The basic problem of numerical experiments is accuracy. Nevertheless the error can be minimized by combining the numerical and traditional experiments. This can be achieved by means of partial validation of numerical results by traditional experiments or by precise and appropriate material properties measurement. In fact, the above approach was applied in current work in order to simulate the influence of curing temperature and time on the thermal conductance of polymers. Thermally conductive adhesives belong to polymer materials. In order to apply numerical simulation it is required to have an appropriate description of the thermal and mechanical behavior of polymers. Most often polymers are described by cure dependent or independent linear viscoelastic model [3, 5]. Having this model, which parameters in fact can be measured experimentally, it is possible to simulate the stress and strain field caused by polymer curing and shrinkage phenomena and finally assess the thermal conductance accordingly. Current paper focuses on a problem of numerical simulation of TCA in order to recognize the trend dependence of thermal conductivity due to viscoelastic model of polymers and filler particles contact area