Thermal Dissipation Efficiency in a Micro-Processor Using Carbon Nanotubes Based Composite

Modern electronic and optoelectronic devices such as u-processor, light emitting diode, semiconductor laser issued a challenge in the thermal dissipation problem. Finding an effective way for thermal dissipation therefore becomes a very important issue. It is known that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is one of the most valuable materials with high thermal conductivity (2000 W/m.K compared to thermal conductivity of Ag 419 W/m.K). This suggested an approach in applying the CNTs as an essential component for thermal dissipation media to improve the performance of computer processor and other high power electronic devices. In this work multi walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) based composites were utilized as the thermal dissipation media in a micro processor of a personal computer. The MWCNTs of different concentrations were added into polyaniline, commercial silicon thermal paste and commercial silver thermal paste by mechanical methods. A personal computer with configuration: Intel Pentium IV 3.066 GHz, 512MB of RAM and Windows XP Service Pack 2 Operating System was employed. The thermal dissipation efficiency of the system was evaluated by directly measure the temperature of the u-processor during the operation of the computer in different CPU speeds. The measured results showed that the CNTs based composite could reduce the temperature of the u-processor more than 5 Delta DGC, and the time for increasing the temperature of the u-processor was three times longer than that when using commercial thermal paste.