Study on Thermal and Hydrodynamic Performance of a Triple Fluid Heat Exchanger with Different Passes and Rows

Abstract

Hybrid cooling system has become a promising thermal management system for data center considering its capability of removing heat from various electronic components systematically. Water cooling and air cooling can be used for cooling the active component and passive component respectively. A novel triple fluid heat exchanger (TFHEX) is designed to dissipate the heat from these fluids into the coolant. This paper discusses thermal and hydrodynamic performance of TFHEX that specially designed for hybrid cooling of data. In present work, the THFEX is designed to dissipate heat from 32kW rack in which the server that dissipates 90% of heat from the active component and 10% of from passive component. Since the water side has much higher load, heat transfer from tube to tube in TFHEX has to be carefully maintained without significant increase in pressure drop. It was found that TFHEX can dissipate heat from different heat source at various load without significant increase in the pressure drop if designed carefully and therefore this heat exchanger can be a feasible solution for hybrid cooling data center. The results critically evaluated the trade-off between the heat transfer capacity of TFHEX and its pressure drop i.e. the pumping power requirement. This can be a reference for data center engineers to select the appropriate configuration for TFHEX for hybrid cooling.