Compressive mechanical response of graphene foams and their thermal resistance with copper interfaces

Abstract

We report compressive mechanical response of graphene foams (GFs) and the thermal resistance ($R_{TIM}$) between copper (Cu) and GFs, where GFs were prepared by the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. We observe that Young's modulus ($E_{GF}$) and compressive strength (${\sigma }_{GF}$) of GFs have a power law dependence on increasing density (${\rho }_{GF}$) of GFs. The maximum efficiency of absorbed energy (${\eta }_{max}$) for all GFs during the compression is larger than ~0.39. We also find that a GF with a higher ${\rho }_{GF}$ shows a larger ${\eta }_{max}$. In addition, we observe that the measured $R_{TIM}$ of Cu/GFs at room temperature with a contact pressure of 0.25 MP applied increases from ~50 to ~90 $m{m}^{2}K/W$ when ${\rho }_{GF}$ increases from 4.7 to 31.9 $mg/c{m}^3$.