Numerical simulation of the single-phase immersion cooling process using a dielectric fluid in a data server

Abstract

In the wake of novel technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT) to cater to a wide spectrum of industrial applications, eventually the demand for ultra-fast processors/data centers has been on rise. In further, these novel technologies inherently result a drastic increase of power density in data centers, where air-cooling is the popularly utilized method to handle the thermal loads. The present research study involves in numerically investigating the effectiveness of single-phase immersion cooling process, an alternate solution to air-cooling method, on governing the heat load of the densely packed servers. A dielectric fluid, EC-110 is chosen for the simulation on a suitably developed CAD model of a server, of rated design power of 150 W. Four different processing unit powers of value 65 W, 90 W, 115 W and 150 W are supplied as input load to the cooling fluid in the simulation work. The condition of inlet temperature of the dielectric fluid is varied from 25℃ to 40℃ and the flow rates are varied from 0.5 lpm to 2.5 lpm. The resulting chip junction temperature in the server is estimated for different flow rates and inlet temperature conditions of the fluid, under immersion cooling technique. It proves that this cooling technique has the potential to ensure safe operation temperature of the server at low flow rates of the fluid with high inlet temperature, at high power densities.