Design, Fabrication and Characterization of a Mini Heat Exchanger for Data Centre Cooling Application

Abstract

In this study, a compact size liquid to liquid heat exchanger used in the cooling system for the servers in a data center has been optimized, fabricated and characterized. The proposed heat exchanger is firstly optimized under the given conditions, including of the space constraints in the blade server rack, the requirement of the heat exchange capability, and requirement of energy efficiency and effectiveness. Then the optimized heat exchanger is fabricated and implemented into a cooling system for test and characterization. Finally, the thermal performance and energy effectiveness of the developed mini heat exchanger has demonstrated and characterized. The developed heat exchanger is with compact size and meets the size requirement of the cooling system for the servers in data center. The developed heat exchanger has been demonstrated with the heat transfer capability of 548W under the specified conditions, meeting the heat dissipation capability requirements (500W) of the developed cooling system. Meanwhile, the developed heat exchanger has been demonstrated with high effectiveness of 0.9 and with high energy efficiency. In addition, the simulation results match well with the measurement results, indicating the proposed simulation model and schemes are valid for liquid-liquid heat exchanger development.