Today's electronics are becoming smaller and faster, resulting in increased power densities and greater risk of thermal problems. Thermal dissipation requirements thus need to be satisfied by the use of several cooling mechanisms. The cooling systems may include conduction, convection and radiation cooling. Conduction can be the most efficient mode of heat transfer and about … [Read more...]
How Thermal Conductivity Relates to Electrical Conductivity
Because the accurate determination of thermal conductivity is a demanding task (often not recognized by either designers or vendors), methods, based on the measurement of another physical property that is uniquely coupled to thermal conductivity, are very challenging. One such method is based on the so-called Wiedemann-Franz Law, which links the thermal conductivity to the … [Read more...]
The thermal conductivity of pure metals
As discussed previously in this section, the measurement of the thermal conductivity is notoriously difficult. The consequence is that, while the measurement accuracy by individual researchers is claimed to be of the order of 2%, laboratories participating in round-robin tests produce results differing from each other by 15% or more [1]. Even the measurement of pure metals is … [Read more...]
