Silicone base as image and analysis interference
As you know, such a thermal paste (like the Arctic MX-4 used here as an example) consists of a silicone base, which is enriched with a lot of interesting and thermally conductive fillers in smallest particle form. Some pastes also have things like ethyl acetate added to them at the bottler’s end to make them a little more pliable and “slippery.” But unfortunately they all contain silicone. And this is exactly the first problem, because silicone negatively influences the resolution and also seriously distorts the EDX.
The following diagram of the EDX shows that also here more than 20% carbon (C), silicon (Si) and also oxygen (O) are to be found, which really disturb us with the analysis, because they affect the accuracy substantially and also represent a large a source of error:
So the silicone has to come out first. MX-4 is also soluble in such nice things as methylene chloride, gasoline, petroleum ether, toluene, kerosene and the aforementioned ethyl acetic, but the fillers we are interested in can be properly dissolved out with xylene. After all, we don’t want to replace one disease with another. So for the rest of the tests, the xylene will do it and we’ll see how well that goes. With a mass comparison, one could then also determine how high the quantitative proportion of silicone in the paste actually is.
And for the pants wearers among you, who always get a beating from the housewife for dirty clothes: Thermal paste is definitely not so easy to wash out or remove with alcohol! A little lighter fluid helps much better, and its residues can also be removed with any laundry detergent. But don’t rub it, otherwise the color will be gone too!
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