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From: Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: silicone grease
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2024 09:32:20 +0100
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On 31/03/2024 15:53, John Larkin wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Mar 2024 13:25:02 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 30/03/2024 18:14, John Larkin wrote:
>>> Give a nice flat mosfet package and a flat heat sink, I wonder how
>>> much benefit accrues from adding silicone grease. It's really messy in
>>> production and it's hard to confirm proper application. A little
>>> googling didn't provide hard numbers.
>>>
>>> I'm thinking a big-die TO-220 fet, bolted to a copper CPU cooler, AlN
>>> or mica insulator, no grease, 40 watts. I guess I'll have to try it.
>>
>> ISTR on one of the overclocking hacker CPU cooling sites someone tried
>> everything from dry to cooking oil and engine oil. The marginal best was
>> some exotic "liquid metal" silver loaded brand I have never heard of and
>> the worst by a long way was dry.
>>
>> The biggest change was from dry to some sort of heat exchange medium is
>> by preventing an air gap. It was a significant difference too.
>>
>> The problem is that your flat surfaces are not exactly flat so that the
>> direct metal contact area can actually be quite small if there is any
>> surface roughness. Air is a rather good insulator and metals don't
>> radiate well at all. Silicon grease prevents air gaps and anything
>> similar will do the same job. It is just that silicon oils and greases
>> are less inclined to evaporate or go rancid and corrode your parts.
> 
> There's a lot of opinion on this but few or no numbers. Some people
> seem to think that their music sounds better, or their gaming scores
> improve, with some expensive grease.

It was quite a simple setup.

Same heatsink, same stress test and note down the CPU core temperature 
at equilibrium. CPUs are convenient in already being well instrumented - 
the biggest difference was nothing vs anything else.

There is an 80:20 rule at work here - you get 80% of the improvement by 
eliminating the tiny air gap by wetting it out with a heat transfer 
medium and the rest is incremental using ever more exotic materials.

In the extreme they still use the near lethal BeO ceramic material in 
some high power RF transistors since it is second only to diamond for 
thermal conductivity whilst being an electrical insulator.

https://materion.com/-/media/files/ceramics/articles/beo-still-a-force-in-rf-power-transistor-packaging.pdf

In the bad old days you used to have to be careful of TO-3 can 
transistors that had blown their top for that stuff. These days they use 
inferior but much safer alternatives like alumina and aluminium nitride.

You say that there are no numbers. Where have you been looking?

> A TO-220 footprint with a 100 micro-inch air gap, assuming zero
> metal-metal contact to the heat sink, calculates to 0.65 K/W. I
> wouldn't mind 0.65. A 2 mil mica insulator gets that up to about 1,
> which is still fine for my application.

If you are prepared to de-rate accordingly then there isn't really a 
problem but if you want to run them at full power then they need to be 
in intimate contact with their heat sink and that means wetted by some 
sort of heat transfer medium. I was quite impressed with the bluetack 
like stuff that came with my Raspberry Pi passive aluminium heatsink.

I found the pads more annoying to handle than silicone grease YMMV.
Getting them on square was much harder than just adding a dab of goo.

-- 
Martin Brown