Thermomechanical and Thermal Contact Characteristics of Bismuth Telluride Films Electrodeposited on Carbon Nanotube Arrays
✍ Scribed by Himanshu Mishra; Baratunde A. Cola; Vijay Rawat; Placidus B. Amama; Kalapi G. Biswas; Xianfan Xu; Timothy S. Fisher; Timothy D. Sands
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 287 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0935-9648
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A miniaturized thermoelectric (TE) cooler module is composed of a large number of TE legs connected electrically in series and thermally in parallel. TE devices operating near room temperature typically create a temperature difference of 30-50 8C, and the TE film thickness for such devices ranges from 10 to 100 mm. From manufacturing and reliability perspectives, the design of TE cooler modules is often constrained by the shear stresses that result from differential thermal expansion, both during steady-state operation and during on/off cycling. In bulk systems, various strategies, such as spring-loaded systems, tension bolts, and welding, have been proposed to enhance compliance during device operation. However, none of these strategies can be directly applied to thin-film based miniaturized TE devices. Additionally, for TE devices operating at higher temperatures, a pressing need exists for stable, compliant, and low thermal resistance interface materials between the TE element and the metallic interconnects. With this motivation, we report here a scalable electrodeposition process to integrate thick-film TE materials with carbon nanotubes (CNT) arrays.
Recently, CNT arrays have been reported to exhibit excellent fatigue strength under cyclic compressive loading and as interface materials, they have been shown to achieve low thermal and electrical interface resistances at moderate contact pressures. Further, CNTs are amenable to heterogeneous integration with other materials. These attributes suggest that compliant CNT arrays can be integrated with minimal parasitic additions to the total electrical and thermal resistances of a TE device.