SBIR Phase II: Innovative Isotropic Ultra-High Thermal Conductivity Diamond Composite Materials

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop and demonstrate an innovative class of composite ultra-high thermal conductivity materials for solid state electronics thermal management applications. There exists a growing need for high thermal conductivity materials that exhibit greatly increased isotropic thermal conductivity and lower density compared to existing thermal conductivity materials and composites. Materials with these characteristics do not presently exist, but are enabling for many other future applications. Under the Phase II effort, the P2SI Team will develop these materials and characterize the fundamental structure-property-processing relationships to enable manufacturing scale-up and commercialization. The P2SI concept is for an Engineered Material where the processing behavior and the resulting macroscopic performance (thermal conductivity) is a unique function of the composite architecture. Building the proposed ultra-high isotropic thermal conductivity materials from a multi-scale constituent level represents a leap in technology that was first developed from the fundamental level and validated in the Phase I program. The impacts of this research are twofold: providing a foundation for a new technology in materials science research; and utilizing these fundamental findings to develop and engineer enabling materials to meet growing needs in industry for thermal management applications.