Should data centers adopt liquid cooling?

Cooling systems in data centers currently face a bifurcated mandate: they must simultaneously augment their operational efficiency while accommodating the exigencies of escalating power densities . While the shift towards liquid cooling appears to address these dual objectives, liquid cooling is still a new topic.

Why is liquid cooling a good choice for high-density data centers?

With the benefits of high reliability and low energy consumption, the liquid cooling technology better meets the cooling needs of new high-density data centers (Deng et al., 2022).

Does a data center need a cold plate liquid cooling system?

The data center retrofitting requires cold plate liquid cooling technology to match traditional air-cooled servers, which are costly to deploy and expensive to operate and maintain. The cold plate liquid cooling technology needs further optimization in terms of architecture, operation, and maintenance.

What is a cooling plate based liquid refrigeration system?

The standard cooling plate-based liquid refrigeration system consists mainly of a cold plate, a cooling distribution unit, a circulating pump, and a chiller (Kheirabadi and Groulx, 2016).

Can liquid cooling be scaled to industrial data centers?

Scaling this type of liquid cooling to industrial data centers introduces challenging complexity . An intermediate technology that bridges the gap between into-chip and cold-plate-on-lid, involves exposing the lid itself to the coolant . This technique is illustrated in Fig. 10 (d) and is gaining popularity.

How does cold plate-liquid refrigeration reduce energy consumption in a data center?

The CPU and memory in the server are all cooled by cold plate-liquid refrigeration increasing the proportion of cooling plate-based liquid refrigeration technology to 90%, which can reduce the energy consumption by up to 50% compared to traditional air-cooled data centers (Zimmermann et al., 2012).