Do you need to dispense Thermal Interface Materials for heat dissipation?
The growing trend towards the development of ever smaller components, more efficiency and higher performance leads to products with a higher heat generation and less surface area available to dissipate it. Removal of this excess energy becomes critical and more and more solutions for effective thermal management are required to guarantee products operational lifetime and reliability.
Within this context, Thermal Interface Materials (TIM) have been developed, which are thermally conductive materials applied to increase thermal transfer efficiency between a heat generating device and a heat dissipating housing or heat sink to avoid overheating.
A central approach is to use fluid thermal interface materials such as gap fillers or thermally conductive adhesives.
To achieve a reliable heat dissipation, these materials are heavily filled with ceramic particles (commonly aluminium oxide), and consequently have higher viscosity and abrasiveness. Since the abrasive particles can easily wear the moving parts of equipment used for transferring and dosing, and reduce the life out of the seals in the pumps and valves, parts in contact with the material should be designed for abrasion resistance. Moreover, separation of the fillers from the resin has to be also considered. Neglecting these issues may lead to equipment down time, high maintenance requirements, replacement expenditures and most importantly product failure.
Due to these characteristics, dispensing of TIM becomes a great challenge and the use of dispensing technology optimized for those applications is essential and requires specialized equipment to ensure high process reliability and material performance.
Dispensing solutions for fluid TIM
The proper solution for dispensing fluid TIM will depend mainly on material type and package, throughput requirements and geometry of parts.
Two different material feeding units have been developed for safe and trouble-free supply of highly viscous, filled and abrasive materials: A280 when materials are supplied from pails, and A90C/B when materials are supplied from cartridges.
These feeding units, along with the DOS P metering head optimized for the application of TIMs, offer a proper dispensing solution for such products.
Figure 1. Manual work stations Dos A280 comprising material feeding unit A280 and piston metering head: a) A280 – 1C; b) A280 – 2C.
Figure 2. Manual work stations Dos A90 comprising material feeding units A90 and piston metering head: a) A90C; b) A90B.
Besides, the DispensingCell unit offers a complete, fully pre-configured and parameterized solution for thermal management applications. The system has been specially adjusted to thermally conductive media, both single or two component materials, tested and released by renowned manufacturers.
The DispensingCell is equipped with the piston dispensing head Dos P016 TCA, optimized for materials with high viscosity and content of fillers, the cartridge ejection unit A90 C, with product level monitoring and available in 4 variants for Semco and Euro cartridges, as well as a 3-axis system and safety light curtain.
The unit is available in different sizes and single components can be precisely matched to the dispensing medium used, the demanded performance and the required dispensing range. Thus, the system offers high flexibility.
Finally, note that the system is manufactured with standardized modules, and a lean production provides the basis for short lead times.
Users benefit from short delivery times, a quick production launch thanks to Plug and Produce, and a small investment, preserving the usual high quality of Scheugenpflug products.
Key features:
- Precisely dispensing unit with XYZ axis system
- High process reliability through inlet valve monitoring in the metering head
- CE conformity and easy access via safety light curtain
- User-friendly control with SCP200+ visualization
Advantages:
- Preconfigured complete package for highly filled, abrasive materials
- Fast start of production
- Incomparable service life
- Short delivery times
TIM applications
Thermal Interface Materials can be used wherever there is a need to dissipate heat from an electronic device. Because of their highly flexible nature, TIM offer protection from extreme temperature cycling, thermal shock and vibration.
They are widely used in automotive, industrial and consumer electronics applications such as engine control modules, power electronics, battery systems in hybrid and electric vehicles, LED lighting, smartphones, tablets and household appliances.
