Experimental Validation and Design Simulations of a Passive Two-Phase Cooling System for Datacenters

Thermosyphon cooling systems represent the future of datacenter cooling, and electronics cooling in general, as they provide high thermal performance, reliability and energy efficiency, as well as capture the heat at high temperatures suitable for many heat reuse applications. On the other hand, the design of passive two-phase thermosyphons is extremely challenging because of the complex physics involved in the boiling and condensation processes; in particular, the most important challenge is to accurately predict the flow rate in the thermosyphon and thus the thermal performance. This paper presents an experimental validation to assess the predictive capabilities of JJ Cooling Innovation’s thermosyphon simulator against one independent data set that includes a wide range of operating conditions and system sizes, i.e. thermosyphon data for server-level cooling gathered at Nokia Bell Labs. Comparison between test data and simulated results show good agreement, confirming that the simulator accurately predicts heat transfer performance and pressure drops in each individual component of a thermosyphon cooling system (cold plate, riser, evaporator, downcomer (with no fitting parameters), and eventually a liquid accumulator) coupled with operational characteristics and flow regimes. In addition, the simulator is able to design a single loop thermosyphon (e.g. for cooling a single server’s processor), as shown in this study, but also able to model more complex cooling architectures, where many thermosyphons at server-level and rack-level have to operate in parallel (e.g. for cooling an entire server rack). This task will be performed as future work.