Efficient heat conducting liquid metal/CNT pads with thermal interface materials

Ga-Based thermal interface material (TIM) pads/sheets with high thermal conductivity ($$\kappa $$) are indispensable components in thermal management systems. Here, we present a feasible method to fabricate heat conduction pads, which are composed of carbon nanotubes embedded into a liquid metal (LM). This setup has resulted in a large increase of $$\kappa $$ reaching $$\sim $$14.2 $$\hbox {W mK}^{-1}$$, greater than that of most of the commercial thermal silicone pads ($${\sim }5~\hbox {W mK}^{-1})$$. In addition, a series of experiments were conducted on smartphones to evaluate the heat dissipation performance of the CPU. It turned out that LM/nanotube pads with TIMs show distinguish thermal conductivity performance.