Design and characterization of novel graphene-enhanced vapor chambers for lightweight and high-performance electronics cooling

The trend towards miniaturization of electronics and increasing transistor density in semiconductors requires more efficient cooling solutions. Vapor chambers are well established passive cooling devices that are used in a wide variety of electronics. Commercial vapor chambers are often made of high-density metals such as copper which can be a downside in lightweight applications such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. In this study, different novel lightweight graphene-enhanced vapor chambers were built using graphene-assembled film with high thermal conductivity as envelope material. The thermal performance of the designed graphene-enhanced vapor chambers was characterized in a customized test rig and compared to a copper vapor chamber. One of the graphene-enhanced vapor chambers was shown to have 21.6% lower thermal resistance than that of a copper vapor chamber with the same design. A mass-based thermal resistance parameter was introduced as a figure of merit to account for the superior low density of the graphene-enhanced vapor chambers. The mass-based thermal resistance of the graphene-enhanced vapor chamber was seen to be 46.5% lower than that of the copper vapor chamber. The result of this study shows that replacing copper with graphene-assembled film as envelope in vapor chambers can both reduce thermal resistance and decrease the mass of the device. Hence, it is believed that graphene-enhanced vapor chambers have great potential for replacing conventional metal-based vapor chambers in lightweight and high-performance electronics and power module cooling applications in the future.