Improvement of thermal properties of micro head engine electroplated by graphene: experimental and thermal simulation

The present work deals with to improve knowledge of the mechanism of deposition of graphene on a complex geometry. The component of this study is an aluminum micro head engine that represents an interesting study case for its application in the field of heat dissipation. It has been coated with copper and graphene nanoplatelets by an electrodeposition process. The tests are conducted by realizing a system heat source similar to engine thermal behavior. The analysis has been developed on a micro head engine with a comparison between thermography results and finite element method (FEM) thermal analysis by commercial software Ansys. A three-dimensional heat conduction model in the coating structure was built, based on which FEM simulation was done. The influence of convection conditions has been evaluated by a comparison with FEM analysis without computational fluid dynamics simulations. The increase of thermal conductivity of coated specimen has been evaluated with the original one. Data analysis was performed by a comparison with 2-norm of fitting curves between the laboratory tests and simulations.