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Thermal Applications

With a thermal conductivity four times higher than copper, diamond is an ideal material for a range of thermal management applications. Coupled with this, the material is an electric insulator. In all types of electronic and electrical applications the build up of heat can destroy delicate circuitry or severely impair performance.

One of the first applications of diamond was as a heat sink for sensitive electronic components used in the telecommunications industry. Since then Element Six has developed a range of polycrystalline diamond and diamond composite materials that can be used in a wide range of thermal management applications.

One of the company’s recent innovations is ScD Thermal. ScD Thermal is part of a new family of diamond-silicon carbide composites that are being developed to provide cost-effective solutions in a wide range of industrial applications.  ScD Thermal combines diamond particles with silicon carbide to create a range of low cost materials that have excellent thermal and mechanical properties, making them ideal for use in the thermal management of electronic systems.

ScD Thermal is produced by a reaction bonding process in which a green body of diamond particles, silicon carbide grit and carbon (produced by the in-situ surface graphitisation of the diamond) is infiltrated with liquid silicon at sub-atmospheric pressure.  The silicon reacts with the carbon to form new silicon carbide which grows epitaxially on the existing silicon carbide grains and the diamond particles.  Once all the available carbon has reacted, any remaining space is filled by the silicon.

The resulting material is mechanically stable and exhibits little dimensional change with temperature.  In addition, the final shape and size of the ScD object is close to that of the green body, which means predictable and consistent forms can be created with fine features and minimises the amount of post-fabrication processing required.  This ability to produce near-net-shape objects is one of the key attributes of the technology and enables the production of complex shapes in high volumes. 

The ScD process is extremely flexible and can be tailored to produce a range of grades that are optimized for particular applications by altering the diamond content, the diamond grit quality and size, the shape of the diamond particles and the distribution of the diamond throughout the material.  In essence, the larger the diamond particles, the better the thermal conductivity of the material, while finer grit provides ScD with superior mechanical performance.  ScD can also be tailored to have a thermal expansion coefficient that closely matches those of a wide range of low thermal expansion materials including silicon.