A model for the thermal properties

Thermal properties are important to several applications for powder metallurgy products. For example, liquid-phase sintered tungsten-copper composites are used in microelectronic packaging to obtain a high thermal conductivity in a low thermal expansion material. This article addresses modeling the thermal properties for composites fabricated by liquid-phase sintering. A computational cell is constructed with interlinked phases, consisting of a core of low thermal expansion material (tungsten) 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 results are applied to prior reports on W-Cu and used as a basis to identify several candidate high thermal conductivity systems for future development.