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In the COMPATHERM Paste product line, Nolato offers a range of thermal pastes with high thermal performance and particularly low density. These materials allow you to make significant savings in your paste expenditure, even while the actual cost of the material is no lower than that of competing products.
How is this possible?
In many cases, thermal materials such as paste and fillers are purchased by units of mass – in grams, kilos, and tons.
However, it needs to be remembered that consumption of these materials is typically done by units of volume – in cc’s, litres, and cubic metres.
Whether material is dispensed volumetrically or by mass in production, the actual usage is always defined by a volume. With a given contact area between heat source and heat sink, and with a given gap and tolerance variation between the two, the maximum empty space defines the minimum volume of material that needs to be placed in the interface to ensure that there never are voids in the interface to obstruct heat transfer.
What this volume of material happens to weigh is in itself immaterial – it is only defined by what the density of the material used happens to be.
What is the significance of this?
Consider for example a case of stencil screen printing:
In our example, we have a 1mm thick stencil with a 46x33 matrix of 3.5x3.5mm openings – i.e. 1,518 openings – that is used to print paste onto a heat sink.
The volume of each opening in the stencil is 3.5x3.5x1= 12.25mm3.
The volume of paste needed to print one heat sink is thus 1,518x12.25= 18,595.5mm3, or 18.6cc.
If we consider a typical thermal paste, with a density of around 3g/cc, one print will weigh about 56g.
If we instead consider e.g. Compatherm Paste 9431 with a density of 2.2g/cc, one print will weigh only 41g – more than 25% less!
This means that the per unit of mass price of 9431 could be allowed to be 35% higher than the competitor, and still yield a lower cost per printed unit. Typically however, the Compatherm Paste prices differ somewhat less than that from competitors in a similar performance range – meaning that the potential savings in production costs can be considerable.
Add to this the fact that by choosing Compatherm Paste, you are by no means choosing to compromise on performance for cost – very much the opposite! Compatherm Pastes have for instance been selected by leading brands in the global telecommunications and LED lighting industries, where thermal performance is very much at a premium, for their superior thermal performance, well in excess of that of competing materials.
In the interests of promoting a more widespread understanding in the industry of how usage of dispensable thermal materials always is defined per volume, the default packaging for Compatherm products is by unit of volume rather than mass.
Contact a Rotec sales representative for more information!
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