"The power consumption of cooling infrastructure for energy-intensive data centers and other large electronic systems is skyrocketing," says materials scientist Guihua Yu, from the University of Texas at Austin.
"That trend isn't dissipating anytime soon, so it's critical to develop new ways, like the material we've created, for efficient and sustainable cooling of devices operating at kilowatt levels and even higher power."
The TIM developed here is a colloidal mixture of the liquid metal galinstan and particles of aluminum nitride, combined in a way that creates a gradient interface – one that helps heat pass through without any hard boundaries between the two substances.