Optimal heat transfer for liquid cooling with minimal coolant volume

Abstract

Uptime, operating cost and serviceability are the major concerns for data center cooling. This paper will describe an air and liquid cooling system that is optimized for data centers and does not involve major infrastructure changes. This system uses a minimum heat exchanger volume and coolant volume in order to simplify the installation at the server and data center level. The goal is to reduce chiller and server power, and removing heat from the CPU and the air in the server achieves that goal. Secondary goals include reducing the volume of liquid inside the server and making it easy to swap out racks, servers or components. The proposed system uses a normal base plate and fin heat sink, with a high performance liquid cooled heat exchanger built into it. This allows heat to be extracted from the CPU as well as the air that flows through the heat sink, removing up to 100% of the heat from the entire server with the liquid cooled heat sink which makes it a literal ‘heat sink’.