Abstract
Electronics are continuing to trend toward reduced size and increased power density. This creates a lot of thermal management challenges within systems leading to reliability concerns. To avoid component failure due to high thermal gradients, often present in new designs, multiple cooling technologies need to be combined to achieve an optimal thermal solution for each package. Passive cooling architectures are beneficial complimentary systems because they can provide thermal gradient mitigation without requiring input power to operate. Phase change materials are one such technology that use their phase transitions to absorb and store thermal energy while maintaining an isothermal temperature in the surrounding system. These have been well studied, but are difficult to implement due to the need to enclose the liquid phase effectively. Encapsulated phase change materials attempt to solve this by covering the core PCM material with a protective shell. The resulting particles can be nano to micro sized and allow the PCM to melt without needing a component to contain the liquid phase. These particles are useful for imbedding in other materials to form composites with thermal hot spot mitigation ability. Silicone gels are often used to as encapsulant materials in modules to protect the components from contamination and to provide electrical insulation. This study proposes creating a new composite with silicone gel and EPCMs to use as encapsulant. This new composite would provide hot spot mitigation and energy storage while remaining useful as an encapsulant. This study has demonstrated the increase in thermal energy storage of the new composites with increased loading of the EPCMs and has characterized the loss in dielectric strength of the composite as a function of EPCM loading percentage.
