Thermal conductivity of compacted AlN samples

The aim of this work is to obtain, without sintering, AlN compacts with a high thermal conductivity h. We report in this paper the main experimental results obtained. We show that a high value of lambda could not be reached by using only AlN powder. It is necessary to realize AlN/metal binary mixtures to improve the compactness of the samples. Physical aspects such as porosity, ductility of metals and chemical aspects (purity, surface state of AlN powder) must be considered. For AlN-metal compacts, it was considered to be of interest to use the hot-pressing technique in order to reduce porosity by bending metal grains, thus to improving thermal conductivity. Published by Elsevier Science Limited.