Abstract

The increasing advances in the electronics industry, which operates with increasingly powerful systems and with greater performances, needs the development of new materials able to dissipate the high amount of heat they generate and that, over 50% of the occasions, is the source of catastrophic failures. The two major approaches in the design and manufacture of heat sinking materials lie in what are called active dissipators and passive dissipators. The last advances in passive dissipation come from Al/diamond composites, which exhibit high thermal properties that can be modulated through the manipulation of interfaces. On the other hand, interconnected pore metal foams have been widely studied because of their active dissipation properties and potentiality as electronic heat sinks. These foams can be designed and manufactured using the well-known replication method. This method produces a composite material consisting of a matrix and inclusions of such a nature that they can be subsequently eliminated by dissolution or chemical reaction. In the present work we propose the manufacture and characterization of materials formed by alternating layers of Al/Diamond and aluminium foam Recorded thermal conductivities reached 435W/Mk and are discussed by models that consider a semi-infinite alternating layered system of composite material and metal foam. In addition, power dissipation densities were recorded under working conditions and values up to 65% higher than conventional aluminium foams were registered.