Design and characterization of novel graphene-enhanced vapor chambers for lightweight and high-performance...

The trend towards miniaturization of electronics and increasing transistor density in semiconductors requires more efficient cooling solutions. Vapor chambers are well established passive cooling devices that are used in a wide variety of electronics. Commercial vapor chambers are often made of high-density metals such as copper which can be a downside in lightweight applications such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. In this study, different novel lightweight graphene-enhanced vapor chambers were built using graphene-assembled film with high thermal conductivity as envelope material. The thermal performance of the designed graphene-enhanced vapor chambers was characterized in a customized test rig and compared to a copper vapor chamber. One of the graphene-enhanced vapor chambers was shown to have 21.6% lower thermal resistance than that of a copper vapor chamber with the same design. A mass-based thermal resistance parameter was introduced as a figure of merit to account for the superior low density of the graphene-enhanced vapor chambers. The mass-based thermal resistance of the graphene-enhanced vapor chamber was seen to be 46.5% lower than that of the copper vapor chamber. The result of this study shows that replacing copper with graphene-assembled film as envelope in vapor chambers can both reduce thermal resistance and decrease the mass of the device. Hence, it is believed that graphene-enhanced vapor chambers have great potential for replacing conventional metal-based vapor chambers in lightweight and high-performance electronics and power module cooling applications in the future.