A MODEL FOR THE THERMAL-PROPERTIES OF LIQUID-PHASE SINTERED COMPOSITES

Thermal properties are important to several applications for powder me tallurgy products. For example, liquid-phase sintered tungsten-copper composites are used in microelectronic packaging to obtain a high ther mal conductivity in a low thermal expansion material. This article add resses modeling the thermal properties for composites fabricated by li quid-phase sintering. A computational cell is constructed with interli nked phases, consisting of a core of low thermal expansion material (t ungsten) and a edge network of high thermal conductivity phase (copper ). This structure is used to calculate the composition effects on the coefficients of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity. The result s are applied to prior reports on W-Cu and used as a basis to identify several candidate high thermal conductivity systems for future develo pment.