Thermal contact resistance across a copper-silicon interface

The issue of thermal contact resistance across metallic interfaces has been investigated for many situations over the past several decades. The application in the present case is contact cooling of high heat load optical substrates. High heat load x-ray mirrors and other optical components used at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) are either internally cooled or contact cooled. In the internally cooled mirrors, a coolant flows through passages configured in the optical substrate. In the contact-cooled case, cooling is provided by placing cooling plates in contact with the mirror to extract the heat. Here, an experimental setup to measure the thermal contact conductance across a silicon-copper (Si-Cu) interface is described, and the results obtained are presented. The resulting thermal contact resistance data are used in estimating the thermo-mechanical and optical performance of optical substrates cooled by interfaced copper cooling blocks. Several factors influence the heat transfer across solid interfaces. These include the material properties, interface pressure, flatness and roughness of the contacting surfaces, temperature, and interstitial material, if any. Results presented show the variation of thermal contact conductance as a function of applied interface pressure for a Cu-Si interface. Various interstitial materials investigated include indium foil, silver foil and a liquid eutectic (Ga-In-Sn). As expected, thermal contact resistance decreases as interface pressure increases, except in the case of the eutectic, in which it was nearly constant. The softer the interstitial material, the lower the thermal contact resistance. Liquid metal provides the lowest thermal contact resistance across the Cu-Si interface, followed by the indium foil, and then the silver foil.