Introduction of Liquid cooling and it's advantages
With the improvement of computing power and performance requirements, AI Artificial Intelligence, Internet of things, machine learning and other technological advances, the temperature of data center infrastructure and it equipment continues to rise. More calculation means more energy, more energy means more heat, more heat means more cooling, and cooling consumes more energy, and so on.
In view of the low efficiency of the traditional air cooling system, as well as the design objectives focusing on sustainability, national policy control, rising power costs and the technical requirements for cooling CPU and GPU, the demand for a more efficient and lower power consumption cooling system is obvious.
Liquid cooling is a new technology in computer cooling, which has the advantages of handling higher power density, running clean, quiet, and the cost is far lower than the traditional air cooling. Research shows that the field of high performance computing occupies the second largest share in the submerged liquid cooling market.
Liquid cold plate:
The working fluid is used as the medium of intermediate heat transmission to transfer heat from the hot zone to the distance for cooling. In this technology, the working liquid is separated from the object to be cooled. The working liquid does not directly contact with electronic devices, but transfers the heat of the object to the refrigerant through high-efficiency heat transfer components such as liquid cooling plate.
Therefore, the liquid cooling cold plate technology is also called indirect liquid cooling technology. This technology directly directs the coolant to the heat source. At the same time, because the specific heat of the liquid is greater than that of the air, the heat dissipation speed is far greater than that of the air, so the refrigeration efficiency is much higher than that of the air cooling. The heat transmitted per unit volume, i.e. the heat dissipation efficiency, is up to 1000 times, which can effectively solve the thermal problem of the high-density server and reduce the energy consumption and noise of the cooling system.
The advantages of the cold plate liquid cooling are: better energy saving, higher device reliability, better performance, lower noise and higher power density.
Immersion liquid cooling:
In the immersion liquid cooling system, the server motherboard, CPU, memory and other components with high calorific value are completely immersed in the refrigerant. Under the working state, each heating component will generate heat, causing the temperature of the refrigerant to rise. When the temperature of the refrigerant rises to the boiling point corresponding to the system pressure, the working medium of the refrigerant changes from liquid state to gas state, and the heat transfer is realized by absorbing heat through vaporization heat.
This technology of cooling by absorbing heat through the refrigerant is called phase change liquid cooling technology. Immersion liquid cooling technology uses liquid phase change to directly take away heat, reducing the thermal resistance in the heat transfer process. Compared with cold plate liquid cooling, immersion liquid cooling technology has higher heat transfer efficiency, and is the most energy-saving and efficient emerging refrigeration mode in liquid cooling.
Thermosyphon cooling:
The medium circulating flow power is generated by the density and height difference, and the heat flow transmission and conversion are realized through the evaporation and condensation of the medium. It has high heat transfer efficiency, makes use of the phase change of the medium to transfer heat flow through the evaporation and condensation of the working medium, does not need additional power, has excellent isothermal performance, simple structure and good adaptability, and can carry out separate structure design for long-distance heat transfer.
Misunderstanding on liquid cooling:
1. Liquid cooling is more expensive than traditional cooling. Actually, Liquid cooling is actually much cheaper than conventional cooling. Research shows that using liquid solutions saves millions of dollars in deployment costs in the data center and energy.
2. It is a complex solution. Although liquid cooling is different from traditional air systems, it is mechanically much simpler rather than more complex. It also makes the entire data center simpler, eliminating the need for hot and cold channels, elevated floors, chillers, humidity control, air processors, and most of the electrical equipment required for air cooling.
3.Difficult to integrate with traditional data centers. Liquid cooling works very well in traditional data centers. Use its existing infrastructure to upgrade older data centers, and even add a high-performance liquid cooling server area to the running air cooling facilities. The installation of liquid cooling system is very simple, and it can be installed in the traditional data center as required.
Air cooling can not keep up with the growing demand for data centers. Liquid cooling is flowing in to repair things. It not only solves all the key problems of air, but also goes far beyond the scope. Liquid cooling processes higher server density while reducing noise and power consumption. In addition to its excellent cooling capacity, liquid cooling has several other advantages, such as location independence and low cost. In conclusion, liquid cooling has sufficient advantages over air cooling to make it an unbalanced comparison.
