Chemical-Vapor-Deposited Graphene as a Thermally Conducting Coating

TL;DR

This study introduces a new method using scanning thermal microscopy and numerical analysis to accurately measure the effective thermal properties of CVD graphene coatings, demonstrating their high thermal conductivity and potential for thermal management.

Contribution

A novel measurement technique combining STM and a lumped-elements model to determine the thermal properties of nanometric graphene coatings.

Findings

CVD graphene has an effective thermal conductivity of 2.5±0.3 mK.

Thermal conductivity increases with the number of graphene layers.

Multilayer graphene can match the thermal performance of thicker metallic films.

Abstract

We performed Scanning Thermal Microscopy measurements on single layers of chemical-vapor-deposited -CVD- graphene supported by different substrates, namely SiO2, Al2O3 and PET using a double-scan technique to remove the contribution to the heat flux through the air and the cantilever. Then, by adopting a simple lumped-elements model, we developed a new method that allows determining, through a multi-step numerical analysis, the equivalent thermal properties of thermally conductive coatings of nanometric thickness. In this specific case we found that our CVD graphene is thermally equivalent, for heat injection perpendicular to the graphene planes, to a coating material of conductivity Keff=2.5+-0.3 mK and thickness teff=3.5+-0.3 nm in perfect contact with the substrate. For the SiO2 substrate, we also measured stacks made of 2 and 4 CVD monolayers and we found that the effective thermal conductivity increases with increasing number of layers and, with a technologically achievable number of layers, is expected to be comparable to that of one order of magnitude-thicker metallic thin films. This study provides a powerful method for characterizing the thermal properties of graphene in view of several thermal management applications.