Standalone immersion cooling for high performance servers

• Main Author: Liang, Wayne
• Other Authors: Fei Duan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176267
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study is to develop an alternative cooling method for data centers, addressing the challenges that arises with the use of traditional air conditioning systems that requires high energy consumption and with a lack of scalability to meet the growing demand for more data centres which is projected to expand at a rate of 21.98% from 2021 to 2026. Specifically, the study explores the efficacy of immersion cooling in dissipating heat from high-performance servers, aiming to demonstrate its superior efficiency as compared to air cooling. The experiment involves the use of a single motherboard server, liquid coolant Novec™ 649 and a circulator unit to control the temperature of the water in the condenser coil. These components are housed within an enclosed tank to facilitate continuous condensation and evaporation cycles. The study employs a two-phase immersion cooling approach and by varying parameters such as CPU load and condenser temperature to investigate cooling effects. Based on past recommendations, the author uses PTFE tape to effectively delay the evaporation of the coolant in the tank which likely affected the CPU temperature obtained. Additionally, a submersible pump is introduced to assess the hypothesis that forced convection is more efficient than natural convection. The results gathered showsthat with the aid of the submersible pump it is able to reduce the overall temperature by about 3-5℃. Future works are proposed to enhance two-phase immersion cooling methods, including the exploration of the use of more cost-effective and efficient coolant and the possibility of an exploration of an alternate method using a multi-fluid cooling system where different coolant fluid can be used to cool a specific zone of the electronic device to achieve targeted cooling to mitigate any hot spot which may lead to newer findings for future works.