At NEDC, we cut thermal pads like it’s our job- cause guess what.. It is. Oftentimes, when we are talking to customers- they may not know exactly how thermal pads work because it may not be obvious what a good insulator air is in an application. A few weeks ago, right before Thanksgiving, we had an Omelet day at NEDC. The eggs are set in the pan through heat. They cook relatively quickly- but we were thinking- I think they’d cook a little better with a thermal pad.
Setup of Experiment:
With that said, we thought we would do something a little bit more fun, and show how thermal pads work by cooking an egg through it. I asked our team for some constructive criticism of our comparison because as they all know, I’m somewhat of a “study snob” meaning, I ask if it was a double blind placebo- I ask how many people were in the study..amd sp pm. So I wanted to make sure that we were being impartial here. Below are images of two things:
Egg 1:
No thermal pad
Egg 2:
Gap Pad 5000S35 .020’’ thick between the saucer pan and the griddle.
Results:
The egg with the thermal pad cooked about 20% quicker, and maintained a temperature about 10 degrees lower on average after several measurements with our temperature gun. I ran this study twice to confirm the results.
How it Works:
A thermal pad is a much better conductor of heat than air. Air is a FANTASTIC insulator.. Almost anything is better than air- however, the thermal pad does two things: it fills the air gaps between the heat source and the heat sink, and it provides a continuous thermal pathway. Different thermal pad chemistries (silicone, silicone-free, flexible graphite thermal pad) all do this — the egg experiment above uses a silicone-based gap pad, but the principle is the same across material families.
More Information
NEDC die-cuts, and waterjet-cuts thermal pads often for customers as build to print items. For more information on thermal pads, please contract sales@nedc.com.