ROME: Recently, Chalmers University of Technology researchers have announced they have developed a method for cooling more efficiently electronics for using graphene-based films. This film has a thermal conductivity capacity which is four times more conductive than copper.
This research actually began about two years ago when researcher Johan Liu led a team which was the first to demonstrate how graphene can, in fact, have a cooling effect on silicon-based electronics.
“But the methods that have been in place so far have presented the researchers with problems,” Liu notes. He goes on to say “It has become evident that those methods cannot be used to rid electronic devices off great amounts of heat, because they have consisted only of a few layers of thermal conductive atoms. When you try to add more layers of graphene, another problem arises, a problem with adhesiveness. After having increased the amount of layers, the graphene no longer will adhere to the surface, since the adhesion is held together only by weak van der Waals bonds. We have now solved this problem by managing to create strong covalent bonds between the graphene film and the surface, which is an electronic component made of silicon.”
