Thermal conduction in graphene thin films considering different materials of various shapes

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison between graphene and other common materials and evaluates the feasibility of the use of graphene as heat spreader material. In this paper we propose to develop a model and numerical procedure for the (i) comparison of graphene with other well-known heat conductors and (ii) simulate heat propagation to verify the effect of different architectures. The whole work is based on simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics (version 4.3b) software package which allows us to develop a numerical model by solving partial differential equation. We have tried to focus on how different architecture of heat spreader affects the heat transfer phenomena and also the effect of proper alignment of the heat spreader with respect to the hot spots. We include several hot spots at different locations at the same time to analyze how the position of hot spots influence the overall temperature distribution and which positions are dominant in heat generation. The result of these analyses can be provided as useful input for experimental design of heat spreader and the selection of material for different applications, mainly in device-level thermal management.