Application of multiwall carbon nanotubes for thermal dissipation in a micro-processor

One of the most valuable properties of the carbon nanotubes materials is its high thermal conductivity with 2000 W/m.K (compared to thermal conductivity of Ag 419 W/m.K). It suggested an approach in applying the CNTs in thermal dissipation media to improve the performance of computer processors and other high power electronic devices. In this research, the multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) made by thermal chemical vapour deposition (CVD) at our laboratory was employed as the heat dissipation media in a microprocessor a Personal Computer with configuration: Intel Pentium IV 3.066 GHz, 512Mb of RAM and Windows XP Service Pack 2 Operating System. We directly measured the temperature of the microprocessor during the operation of the computer in two modes: 100% usage CPU mode and over-clocking mode. The measured results showed that when using our thermal dissipation media (a mixture of the mentioned commercial thermal compound and 2 wt.%. MWCNTs), the temperature of the microprocessor decreased 5 deg. C, and the time for increasing the temperature of the microprocessor was three times longer than that when using commercial thermal compound. In over-clocking mode, the processor speed reached 3.8 GHz with 165 MHz of system bus clock speed; it was 1.24 times higher than that in non over-clocking mode. The results confirmed a promising way of using MWCNTs as the thermal dissipation media for microprocessor and high power electronic devices.