High Thermal Conductivity Silicon Nitride Ceramics

This paper deals with the recent developments of high thermal conductivity silicon nitride ceramics. First, the factors that reduce the thermal conductivity of silicon nitride are clarified and the potential approaches to realize high thermal conductivity are described. Then, the recent achievements on the silicon nitride fabricated through the reaction bonding and post sintering technique are presented. Because of a smaller amount of impurity oxygen, the obtained thermal conductivity is substantially higher, compared to that of the conventional gas-pressure sintered silicon nitride, while the microstructures and bending strengths are similar to each other between these two samples. Moreover, further improvement of the thermal conductivity is possible by increasing ${\beta}/{\alpha}$ phase ratio of the nitrided sample, resulting in a very high thermal conductivity of 177 W/($m{\cdot}K$) as well as a high fracture toughness of 11.2 $MPa{\cdot}m^{1/2}$.