Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research (IFAM) in Dresden,has created a new thermal material by adding these diamond crystals with a carbide film to copper. IFAM’s project manager, Dr Thomas Schubert, explained that “diamond conducts heat roughly five times better than copper. The resulting material expands no more than ceramics when heated, but has a conductivity one-and-a-half times superior to copper. This is a unique combination of properties.”Copper heatpipes are commonly seen winding their way around heatsinks these days, but even copper’s thermal conductivity looks decidedly feeble in comparison to that of diamond. Of course, a diamond-encrusted heatsink would be ridiculously expensive, but researchers are slowly finding ways to access the thermal properties of diamond. Sparkle recently announced that it had successfully tested coolers using a diamond-like carbon coating, and now researchers in Germany claim to have achieved decent cooling results by adding diamond powder to copper.
According to IFAM, the new material was a response to requests to discover “a material with special properties that can efficiently dissipate heat even in devices with densely packed components and that can give increasingly miniaturised electronics a longer life.” As well as being able to conduct heat more efficiently than copper, the new material also couldn’t expand to more than ceramics or silicon at high temperatures.
