How Manufacturers Test Heatsinks & Thermal Compound
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 7:27 am
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/html ... er_a1.html
that discusses TIM's that I'm currently interested in based on my job in the Calibration Lab. We've been in contact with Arctic Silver Inc and discussing their product which most of us know: Arctic Silver 5.
We've used it in one of our applications when measuring surface temperatures up to 300°C. They were surprised that it actually worked for our calibration purposes as a TIM when we place our precision surface probe on to our temperature standard. This standard looks like this:
In calibrating these surface sensors, we have to maintain a 4:1 calibration ratio as a minimum. With tolerances on the surface probes decreasing (a good thing), we continually struggle to eliminate as much error as possible when making a measurement. This error is called measurement uncertainty.
The folks at Arctic Sliver were kind enough to send my company (Guidant) a sample of some other compound that he thought might work better for our application, but it did nto and we went back to Arctic Sliver #5. Note that our use for this TIM will only stay on the probe for less than 1 minute, then wiped off. We were so impressed with the results from #5, that we ordered 20 tubes.