Make Our Best Thermal Paste... YOURSELF!

hi today's video is really an extension of our last video where i tested various thermal interface materials thermal greases thermal pastes you know the goo that you use to put on a cpu in order to facilitate the heat removal and into a heat sink i showed you the machine that i used to do the testing and then i compared a variety of leading commercial pastes in addition i tested two compounds that i formulated and i beat them what i'm going to do today is i'm going to show you why i was able to beat them and exactly how i was able to do it i'm going to show you how to make it [Music] to begin with we need to get a better understanding of heat heat and sound are both manifestations of kinetic energy the heat energy in this room represents the mass of all of the air molecules in this room times the velocity squared of the speed at which they are careening into each other and bouncing off of the walls inside of the room if you warm the air in this room you don't increase the number of molecules you don't increase the mass of the molecules you increase their velocity the same thing holds for the solid particles inside of a bar of aluminum like this inside of this bar the individual aluminum atoms are held in a 3d matrix or lattice by the elastic electrostatic forces between them and their neighbors and even though it doesn't look like it the aluminum atoms in this bar are moving very quickly but what they're doing is they're vibrating back and forth around their center position and that vibration is their velocity if you heat up this bar you increase the velocity of those little springy aluminum atoms and increase the distance that they travel when they are bouncing back and forth if you continue to heat it they will move fast enough that they move far enough that they begin to overcome the interatomic forces and it melts that heat though is chaotic it's random it's isotropic meaning it's the same in all three dimensions there's no favored axis of movement sound also is kinetic energy when i take this hammer and i slam it onto the end of this bar i'm adding energy into the bar in the form of accelerating the atoms at the point of contact and forcing them because of their higher velocity to move away from that point of contact and further as a result they apply a pressure to the atoms right behind them which also causes them to move further away from the point of impact and so on and so on and what happens is you produce a velocity wave that moves through the bar at the speed of sound in aluminum this is a very very rapid process and happens at thousands of meters per second several times the speed of a high-speed rifle bullet when you take that hammer and you strike the atoms in that bar this process appears to be almost instantaneous in fact it takes about 25 microseconds for that energy to move through that bar however heat doesn't work that way when you take this blow torch and you heat the end of this bar i'm adding substantially more heat than i did with the hammer and even though i'll eventually add enough heat that i can't hold on to the end of this bar it still doesn't feel warm at this end and the reason for that is that heat energy unlike a coherent wave moving through the bar it's a statistical equilibration of all of the atoms within the bar an increase in velocity of all of those atoms it moves sideways it moves forward it moves backward and it is a very sluggish process not yet and aluminum is one of the best thermal conductors in existence copper is about twice as thermally conductive as aluminum and silver is a little bit better than that there are a couple of ceramic materials that are slightly better again and then there's diamond carbon nanotubules and graphene that's it just about every other material in existence is a poorer thermal conductor than aluminum steel is about one-third the thermal conductivity of the aluminum add a little bit of chromium to the steel make it into stainless steel and it's about 20 times less conductive and all organic materials oils resins rubbers plastics are about a thousand times less thermally conductive than the aluminum and this is a very important thing and i'm going to show you just how significant real this effect is all right so i set up this demonstration and what we have here is two solid one meter long aluminum rods that have been supported on this table and have a thermal probe mounted in the end of each rod at the same location those probes feed down into this temperature meter here the t1 or the top measurement which is this measures this rod here and t2 which is this wire measures this rod here the rods are identical except for one one important fact halfway or part way through this rod over here i sliced it and i interposed a millimeter thick piece of plastic so one one thousandth the length of this entire rod is a piece of plastic otherwise the rods are identical the bottom of the rods are going to be placed into a pot of boiling water and what we're going to do is see what happens to the temperature over a period of time when we compare the performance of these two different rods so i'm going to put this insulation up here to try to minimize any changes due to the air in the room like this and then i'm going to bring this thing back and put it into the boiling water and so let's see what happens to these temperatures in t1 and t2 and this just for reference is the temperature inside of the meter itself i chose to use fahrenheit simply because you could do this with celsius but the fahrenheit unit is smaller so the monitor gives us a slightly better resolution when you're using fahrenheit but this would certainly work if we decided we want to do this in metric all right so you can see we've been going about 23 minutes and you can see that t1 over here which represents the probe in the rod that has the uh plastic in it has increased about five and a half degrees and that the probe t2 that's in the solid rod has increased about 10.7 degrees so not quite a doubling in the thermal conductivity in the solid rod versus the rod with the interposed piece of plastic that represents 1 1000th of its length that's pretty impressive how significant that is in slowing down heat transfer but the other thing to take away is that the rod the solid rod here is still only a little bit warm at this end after a total of nearly 24 minutes in boiling water so as you can see even the solid aluminum rod is very sluggish in moving heat and it represents a real bottleneck in keeping electronic devices cool now you may say now wait a minute a long metal rod is not the most effective way in moving heat substantial differences you could use active system like a water flow loop or you could use an osmotic or a convective type of device like a heat pipe and yes that would be a much more effective way to move heat a great distance and it would be part of a thermal management system but you still got to get the heat into and out of the heat pipe at each end because the manufacturers of electronics whether it's cpus or lasers or transistors don't make them as integral units with the heat sink you're going to have to use a thermal interface material and because they operate they perform so much worse than the bulk materials the first thing that you would want to do is to try to make that layer as thin as possible that's why last year when i was doing the video on the thermal epoxy i went through a very simple very easy method to improve the surfaces for less than a dollar and about 10 minutes of time you can take the stock surfaces of the heatsink or the cpu or whatever you're trying to cool and you can flatten and smooth them remarkably and by doing so by making them flatter and smoother you allow them to approximate more closely this will improve the performance of any thermal interface material and is actually more important than the differences in the thermal interfaces so surface prep is key the other issue is that as bad as the thermal interface materials are compared to the bulk material nevertheless they're about 10 to 100 times better than air so you really have to get rid of the air and the simplest way that you could do that is to simply take a drop of oil or liquid put it between the two surfaces like this and eliminate the air and you will substantially improve the thermal conductivity nevertheless you're limited to a material the oil that's about a thousand times worse than the thermal conductivity of the bulk materials now if you could apply a sufficient amount of pressure last time i talked about a very good alternative which is indium film it's inexpensive and it is a low melting point very soft elemental metal that under sufficient pressure will plastically flow between rough surfaces eliminate the air and provide a metal to metal contact that can be as much as 10 times as effective as any thermal compound out there it's great the problem is the amount of pressure you need to see that kind of performance gain means that for something like the size of a cpu you would need to be able to apply a pressure over a quarter of a ton it just isn't practical you need something that will flow like the oil but at the same time has a higher thermal conductivity than the oil and the way you do that is you add powders or materials that have a high thermal conductivity and form a flowable paste and that's where we get into the engineering of the thermal interface material i find this really interesting because there's a number of different issues you have to think about and they all interact but some of them are actually contra intuitive they don't work the way you think they do and that's what i find fascinating if you look at these zirconium oxide balls that i have on the table and imagine them as sort of magnified scaled up versions of the powders that we would add to the oils and you look at this tray that i put in front where i've neatly lined up these 20 millimeter balls in this grid array if you were to take this material and you filled the spaces between them with oil and this represents the thermal interface this material can be loaded into the oil at a maximum concentration of 64 percent you can't get any higher if you tried to add another ball like this you'd either have to add more oil or it would be operating in air and so you're going to lose ground now it gets worse because if you don't have an atomic force microscope and you can line these things up in a nice neat grid like this with typical mixing and clumping the highest concentration of solids you can get in a liquid is 60 meaning 40 percent of that volume remains the low thermal conductivity oil now you still might think well wait a minute zirconium oxide it's a good thermal conductor if we can load that interface space with as much as 60 percent of it being this material are we sixty four percent of the way or sixty percent of the way to the bulk thermal conductivity not even close it turns out that by adding these balls to the oil we will improve the performance over the oil alone but disappointingly not much the contact points between these balls and between the balls and the surfaces are atomically small points and so a substantial amount of the heat that's transferred through this still has to make some of its way through the low thermal conductivity oil we've got to get rid of the oil now if you look at the props you probably know where i'm going if you were to take a much smaller diameter ball and you added it to this you could potentially exclude additional oil and get a much higher solids loading and if the balls are small enough theoretically you could add as much as or take away as much as 60 percent of that remaining volume and turn it into a solid moving to a total solids loading of 84 and if we carried it even further to a smaller powder we could remove 60 percent of that remaining 16 and get ourselves into the 90s and so on and so on asymptotically approaching a solid material with much more contact area this process is called densification and we're going to get into that in more detail when we do the video on ultra high performance concrete the problem with this though is what we've now made is concrete this is like a rock it will not flow and so even though densification is an important process and we will use this in making the resins or the materials nevertheless there are limits you can only go so far the second issue has to do with shear loading or viscous forces this ball interacts with the oil on the surface and the oil molecules themselves interact and so when you take a ball like this and you drop it down through the air the viscous forces with the air are very low and it drops very quickly but if i take this low viscosity silicon oil and i drop the ball through here you'll see that it drops almost as fast as it does through the air it's pretty quick it's lower but pretty quick if i take the same type of oil except a much longer higher molecular weight version of this oil and i dropped the ball in here you can see that it drops painfully slow it's like molasses in january this means that if i were to use a very high viscosity oil i would reach high viscosity levels at a lower solids loading and so you want to use the thinnest oil that you can for this process it turns out that with silicon oils you can get down to about 10 centipois once you go below that point the vapor pressure increases and they have a tendency to evaporate so 10 is about the the best you can do now the next thing is what materials should you use now originally i was very enamored with the idea of using a very high thermal contact conductive material diamond graphene carbon nanotubules they don't work the reason they don't work is because of the irregular shapes of the graphene nanoplatelets these long stringy carbon nanotubules or the cuboidal kind of crystals of diamond they don't allow very efficient densification they lock up earlier on so even though they grant more thermal conductivity than the zirconium oxide would the problem is because you would have a lower solids loading and because the oil is so bad that whatever you gain here you lose by leaving more oil in the mixture what you want is a spherical shaped particle there are a lot of materials that are available in the shape metal powders ceramic powders but not those other materials that i had looked into originally now the next question is size how big should you go i like the nano field the nano science field nano powders and quantum dots and nanobots but the point is in this particular case you actually want to use the largest size particles that you can because of that problem with shear forces as you decrease the diameter of the balls for a given volume of material you increase the surface area you increase the interaction with the liquid and you increase viscosity if you took a look at a couple of the videos we did earlier on epoxies you saw how i took a runny epoxy resin and it turned it into a paste and even a putty by adding just a few percent of a nano powder called fumed silica the huge surface area and interaction with the liquid will thicken it up very rapidly so we want to use the biggest particles possible now where do we start the big question is how close should we assume that these surfaces get and that again is a little bit of a soft issue looking at the industry and the manufacturers and what they use is sort of the standard for thermal bond lines or the thermal interface line these are probably based on the fact that there is pretty similar viscosity in most of the leading compounds and there's sort of narrow range of how much force you can literally put on an electronic device and they come up with 25 microns as sort of a a guide post that's a reasonable thickness and probably the kind of thickness you will see when you apply a heat sink to a cpu so obviously you don't want a particle size that's larger than 25 microns otherwise you'll keep this artificially far apart but because of irregular clumping and mixing you actually want the particle to be significantly smaller than 25 microns but no smaller than necessary again doing some research on this and again my own experimentation i found that sort of the sweet spot is approximately five microns for the largest size particle so the next question is how do we do this densification if you just did it in one stage you might think okay we take these large balls and then we get the nanopowder and we add this to this but like i said the very small particles will add viscosity very quickly so we want to add the largest size as possible and step downward and a good rule of thumb is to use a factor of 10 in the diameters of the particles so if we were using 20 millimeter balls here the next size ball we would want to go down to is two millimeter and if we carried it even further 200 microns how much should you use for those types of ratios you approximately want to use 25 percent of the weight of the next largest ball so if this tray contains about 400 grams of the zirconium oxide it's really heavy you would want to add approximately 100 grams of the two millimeter size balls to this and if we had 200 micron balls in this example you'd want to add 25 grams one quarter of the next size largest particle and that's it those are basically the principles that you need to follow in order to make this high performance material so we're going to take these principles we're going to go next door and i'm going to actually show you how i make the material we're going to mix up some thermal paste come on as i said we made two different compounds last time in the last video one is a very simple to make very low cost compound that performs remarkably well and the other is a very high performance material so we're going to start out with the simple and i selected as the liquid to use for this particular formulation glycerin anhydrous glycerin the reason i chose this is because it's super easy to obtain you can get this on amazon you can get this at a local pharmacy it's non-toxic it's water soluble so it's easy to clean up it has a very low vapor pressure so it doesn't evaporate and it has a remarkably high thermal conductivity except for water it is the highest of any common liquid and helps to compensate for the fact that and also to keep this simple we're not going to be doing the densification process we're just going to depend on one size powder the five micron aluminum powder so to begin with what we're going to do is put on a couple gloves and then we're going to use a very sophisticated piece of equipment the alchemist's friend we're gonna use a mortar and pestle and we're going to weigh out four grams of this liquid into the bottom of the container because this is dense this is only about 3.4 cc's and then into this we're going to add 14 grams of the aluminum powder now this stuff is pretty bulky and you'll probably think at first there's no way i'm going to get this incorporated but you will it's surprising and what this simply requires is patience you want to mix slowly at first not because this stuff tends to get into the air very easily those are pretty big particles but simply because you don't want this to spray out onto the table and as you can see it's a pretty loose powder right now the liquid hasn't worked its way into it so you want to start out by just starting to push this down into the liquid and working it up through from the bottom as it begins to incorporate into the powder and this doesn't take very long a couple of minutes and this is it this is the material that we tested last time and proved to be just about as good as arctic silver and it lasts because it's water soluble you wouldn't want to use this say on a solar cell array outside but certainly inside where it's not going to be wet it's not a problem and as a matter of fact i've had this used on a fish tank led fish tank system that's been operating for a couple of years and it still performs very well so the stuff doesn't dry out the stuff is easy to apply it smears it's very smooth it's very creamy and it sticks to the surfaces very well so this is how you make the inexpensive stuff and the advantage of this is that instead of costing a dollar or two dollars a gram this will cost you a couple of pennies a gram so it's a great alternative if you want to get into doing this but you don't want a lot of equipment and you don't want to spend a lot of money so now let's move to the high performance material all right so now what we're going to do is mix up the high performance material and for this we're going to follow all of the principles that i covered in the other room now when i described the process of densification i described it from the big to the little but in fact in doing the synthesis you actually want to work in the other direction you want to work from little upward because it makes it a lot easier to disperse the different products so to begin with what we're going to do is we're going to be using a 10 centipoise silicon oil this like i said is about as thin or as watery as you can get before this starts to evaporate and so we want to make sure that we don't lose the liquid fraction over time and what we're going to be doing is we're going to take a small beaker and we're going to add to that beaker 16.5 grams of the silicon oil so grab a little stopper here or a little eyedropper here and we'll start doing that okay nailed it now the next thing that we're going to do is add the smallest powder now theoretically i could stay with all the same material but it has to do with availability you want a spherical product that's going to be down around the 20 30 40 nanometer size the problem with staying with aluminum for example all the way through is when you get down to nano nanometer size particles in aluminum they become very dangerous to deal with not only inhalation but much more importantly they can burst into flame because of their huge surface area they can interact with the atmosphere so it's very difficult to obtain that and a far better choice is to use zinc oxide zinc oxide is also a spherical product that's available in the right size range and it is a very good thermal conductor it's used in a lot of thermal pastes and so i have zinc oxide and to this i'm going to add 8.75 grams of the zinc oxide now because the zinc oxide has twice the density of aluminum if you were doing this process at this stage with aluminum i would be using half this weight because it's the volume we're trying to achieve so because of the higher density we're using twice as much by weight to get the same volume as we would if we're using the same types of product all the way through now one of the challenges in dealing with nanomaterials nano sized particles is that because of the very large surface area and the fact that they have a lot of van der waals forces between them as a result of that they're very difficult to disperse they tend to clump and stay in in groups rather than break up and disperse well in the liquid and i don't think it's even possible to adequately disperse this mechanically or i should say by hand what we're going to do is we're going to use a sonicator in order to be able to break this up now a sonicator is basically a very powerful ultrasound generator that focuses its energy down through a horn here and what the horn does is it will move up and down very very quickly at around 20 kilohertz and create enormous accelerations on the order of a hundred thousand g's as a result of that very rapid movement it will cavitate the liquid and it will create a lot of turbulence and that will break up the individual little particles as well as mix them or blend them in with the liquid so we're going to put this small container inside the sonicator here we're going to raise this up like this now the sonicator can generate a lot of power and so we're going to actually turn this all the way down to 100 watts and because that will still cause a lot of heating in here what we're going to do is we're going to run this on a 50 duty cycle which means five seconds on five seconds off to give this more time to distribute its heat into the environment and we're gonna run this entire run five seconds on five seconds off for a total of six minutes the other thing about this is this is very loud and it can actually be dangerous and so they will sell these with enclosures to protect the hearing of the people around them but the enclosures are expensive they're bulky and they do limit your access to the equipment here and so what we're going to do is we're going to slip on a couple of pair of headphones assure that nobody else is in the building and then we're going to start this running okay i've got my headphones on now let's go ahead and turn this on all right here we go okay ah that feels good now this material here is very warm it's hot to the touch and that's one of the reasons why the duty cycle this can certainly mix up much larger quantities than this now what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring this over here and i'm going to go to the second stage which is i'm going to mix up the next size powder in the scale we're going to start by taking this jar we're going to measure out 15.15 grams of this material into the jar that's it now two things one is that as i described i'm going to put the actual ratios below the video so you'll have the actual ratios of the added components but because of the fact that we're going to be adding these things in different containers for different steps i leave inevitably i leave some of the material behind so the ratio of the zinc oxide to the oil that i gave you was correct but because of the fact that i'm leaving some behind the absolute numbers are not really that important it's the ratio so even if i made a liter of this stuff right now i would still only be taking out 15.15 grams so depend on the ratios below don't focus on the numbers the absolute numbers i'm giving you to give you those ratios the second thing and this was very very important is i made a fortuitous discovery one of those eureka moments and it was made by accident what happened was early on when i was doing this i wasn't sure what the actual working fluid was going to be whether it was going to be a glycerin or it was going to be a polyalcohol or a silicon oil and so i had ordered a variety of different types of nano and micro powders i ordered zinc oxide in both a neat or pure form as well as a coated form that had a silene coating a molecular layer of silane over the the outside of the spheres the reason that's done is to increase its hydrophilic affinity in other words to allow it to interact better with polar or water-like solvents let's say stay suspended longer however i was doing this once at about two o'clock in the morning i was really tired i was not paying attention and i noticed that when i finished this step the material was a lot thinner than i expected and what i had accidentally done is taken the zinc oxide with the silene coating and used it in the non-polar silicon oil really it's not what it's made for the point is though it was a lot thinner and i knew the numbers were right and so i just went ahead and proceeded to make the full formulation but using the wrong powder and it was substantially less viscous which allowed me to actually increase the solids loading a little more for the same amount of viscosity and i got better performance so silene coated zinc oxide not the plain zinc oxide is the appropriate material now to add to this we got a couple choices i'm going to be adding 300 nanometer aluminum powder now this stuff is not way down in the nanometer scale and it has a little bit more vulnerability than say the five micron powder to ignition but it's still not too bad nevertheless this size is pretty hard to obtain i get it from a guy that i know out in california with a laboratory that is able to produce this so you may not be able to get a hold of the 300 nanometer aluminum powder but if you can't the same sky spring supplies copper powder which is spherical in the same size range and so you could you could use copper for this stage and it works almost as well so it's a perfectly legitimate alternative and it won't burst into flame on you but we're going to stay with the aluminum for this demonstration here and so what i'm going to be doing is adding 10.5 grams of the 300 nanometer powder to this right here okay 10.5 now what we're going to do is we're going to measure the full weight of this jar and you'll understand why in just a second full weight 158 grams i'm now going to take this jar that has a little bit of tap water in it and i'm going to fill it to 148 grams 10 grams less than this guy again this will make sense in just a sec this is just tap water that's it okay now the reason i did that is because this material here is too thick to have combined in the beginning with the ultrasound we have to use another method of incorporating this fine powder and you might be able to do this mechanically but i don't think you will be able to do a good job so what we're going to do is use a different device called a paste mixer now these devices are available industrially for mixing very thick pastes as you can see it says solder paste mixer this model here unlike the many thousands of dollars you can pay for pharmaceutical quality mixers is sort of a cheap chinese knockoff and i bought this used on ebay for just a couple of hundred bucks and i hacked it but the basic principle is the same and they're really very useful the reason you would use this for solder paste is if you have a jar say a half kilogram jar of solder paste it sits around your shop for a long time the some of the solids can sink to the bottom and you want to blend it up and this is the device you would use to do that with so if i open up the inside of this thing and you take a look you'll see that there is this rotating table here looks a little bit like a centrifuge and this table is mounted on a spindle which is driven by a motor and spins around what you can't see is that underneath that this platter here is a pulley that does not rotate with the motor it's actually fixed to the structure and because it's not rotating when these cups out here move around the belt that attaches their individual pulleys on each side to that fixed pulley causes these individual cups to rotate so if you watch it forms a planetary type action here where this goes around in a circle and these individually go around on a circle and what that does is that the g forces the centripetal forces tend to push the liquids down to the outer part right here just because of rotation but because this cup is constantly rotating like this what is the bottom of the cup of the jar continues to change position so this blends by a shear force against the inside of the the jar the container in addition the centrifugal forces or the centripetal forces that are pushing the denser materials to the bottom are always doing that but the bottom keeps changing its position and this creates a lot of turbulence below the surface and just like the turbulence that's created with this both of these devices are very effective at outgassing or removing dissolved air because you're constantly exposing new surface without folding in air and the very large turbulence here which turns around underneath the surface again doesn't fold in air and we don't want air air is our enemy so this is good for degassing and it's good for blending the hacks i performed are very simple you see how i wrote add 10 grams in order to get this not to vibrate so much i add a little bit to this cup and that reduces the vibration in addition because i'm not doing solder paste i'm just doing lightweight jars of material i didn't mind the fact that if i got a much bigger motor in here and brought up the rpms i could increase the the mixing and speed up the operation a lot so this thing actually rotates twice as fast as the stock machine and because these are so much lighter this can withstand those forces in addition i added a better cooling fan better cooling system inside so this wouldn't overheat so what we're going to do is we're going to install the heavier of the two jars in the add 10 gram side make sure the lid is on nice and tight we don't want that to spill same thing here and we're going to put this on the lighter side and force these in there like that then we're going to close the lid and we're going to turn this on and we're going to run this for 12 minutes oh all right so let's take a look and see what we got all right nothing flew apart and let's look at the two jars this is the counterweight jar so it's got nothing in it and this is the blended jar here and let's take a look inside and you can see that you get a nice thick creamy material but clearly this is too thick for the ultrasound to be able to blend up and the next stage after this is too thick for this paste mixer so we're going to have to go to another method of getting the final incorporation of the final particles so we're going to bring this over here and once again we're going to use the alchemist's friend and what we're going to do is i'm going to take 8.55 grams out of here and place it in the bottom of the mortar mortar of the mortar and pestle all right it's very homogeneous to this we're going to add 14.6 grams of the five micron aluminum powder so we'll tear that out and start going oh i've already got that in there okay 14.6 grams 10 milligrams off not bad you want to be pretty precise with these measurements though so now you're probably thinking probably not let's see now the point is if you do this for a total of an honest five minutes with this mortar and pestle first of all you'll get really strong arms but secondly you'll get a very good thermal compound but what i discovered is that if you do an honest 30 minutes in other words you go for five minutes your arm starts to burn you go get a drink you come back five more minutes and you go walk the dog you come back and you do 30 real minutes the performance of the material actually continues to increase so it may be in fact that i haven't reached the limit of the performance of this material and with even even better incorporation you may be able to produce a superior material to the one that i demonstrated and because there are industrial mixers that can handle very thick pastes like this that can potentially do a much better job than i'm doing that may be very possible however they cost many thousands of dollars and the mortar and pestle is certainly a very inexpensive way of doing the same thing and as you can see now this material has become very spreadable and with a little bit more mixing will become even creamier now let's just pretend for a second that i had done this for 30 minutes one of the problems with mixing it in this way is unlike the first two steps this does incorporate air i'm folding air into this and as a consequence that's going to decrease the performance of the material so one step remains let's go over to the vacuum pump okay so this is the final step we're going to take the material that i combined in the mortar and pestle and to which i added some air and we're going to place it inside the vacuum chamber and we're going to run this down to a couple of microns for at least several hours i typically run this for six hours and there is a noticeable improvement in the performance when you do remove some of that incorporated air so this step is definitely worth it but that's it mr reardon that's it this is the material that we ended up demonstrating last time performed so well against the commercial thermal pastes and as i promised what we're going to do is we're going to send a couple of samples of this material over to linus tech and if they're willing see what kind of uh results they get when they compare this against other commercial materials i've also put below this video in the description a list of the exact proportions of the materials we used in order to make this and you obviously saw how to do this now most of you are not going to have access to this type of equipment but if you do have access to a reasonable university or industrial laboratory they will have this and they may even have better stuff and as i said there is a possibility you may be able to actually improve on the results that i achieved by using better equipment but in any case we did get a pretty good compound out of this and you should be able to reproduce it if you don't want to take the time the effort or the money to try to reproduce this we will go ahead and we will put this material on sale on our website as i showed you last time it performs very well and it's less expensive than most of the commercial materials out there and it helps to support the cost the expenses that we have in producing these videos there's a lot of money involved in gathering the equipment and the materials also if you have any kind of questions or want to make any kind of comments put them below in the comments section because i read them all and it also helps to give me ideas for future videos it also helps youtube their algorithm rhythms to spread the video to distribute it out to a greater number of people in addition if there is any possibility or even considering subscribing please do it it has more value than you might realize we cover a broad range of topics if you look at our playlist we cover a broad range of different types of technologies we go into a lot of detail and we give you practical applications but in addition to that by increasing the size of the channel you help us to produce better videos because as the footprint of the channel increases we become more attractive to potential collaborators to interviews to site visits and we can produce a broader range of more interesting kind of comment content so hopefully you found this interesting and useful and enjoyable and i just want to thank you very much for spending your time and watching you take care and have a wonderful [Music] you

Channel: Tech Ingredients

Views: 330,937

Keywords:

Id: 8RJ-vLLwDPU

Length: 46min 44sec (2804 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Put_It_All_On_Blck]

Oh god, not this channel. It's very educational and interesting and I always find myself going down a rabbit hole of information I don't actually need to know, and lose hours out of my day.

[u/Sylanthra]

Watched his video on the performance of the pastes themselves. I really wished he compared it to Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut and Conductonaut.

[u/skindragon]

He's the new Mr. Wizard

[u/anatolya]

Saving that in case we have a fucking thermal paste shortage

[u/criscothediscoman]

One simple trick DerBauers hate.

[u/Netblock]

I kinda sorta do my own thermal pastes, using graphite and diamond powder with silicone grease and oil, sometimes platforming off of some bulk paste (GD900).

By far, the largest finding I've had is that it does not matter how theoretically conductive the paste is, if the contact pattern of the two surfaces is awful. Be it from too thick/dry the paste (and particle clumping), or outright an improper mount.

I've also realised that graphite behaves pretty nicely when dry/thick due to its natural lubrication properties.

And when there is a good mount and good thermal transfer, don't expect it to last because pumpout is painfully real.

I have yet to get into doing something that cures, in attempt to fight pumpout. I do have some thermal glue that I could try diluting.

[u/The-Strongest-Ant]

Loved this video, one of the few of his I could actually sit through but they are all always packed with cool info about the subject.

[u/resrep2]

Thank you this is really interesting content for a change.