Will Data center liquid cooling be the main stream thermal solution in the future
In the era of big data explosion, especially with the development of AI technology, the amount of data increases in geometric multiples. The data center, which undertakes these data operations and storage, also has the development trend of high density and high power. One problem brought about by such development is heat dissipation. The traditional air cooling and heat dissipation system is gradually overwhelmed, and liquid cooling technology has been more and more widely used because of its higher efficiency and lower energy consumption.
Classification of liquid cooling
There are two main types of liquid cooling, one is called direct contact liquid cooling, and the other is called indirect contact liquid cooling. This distinction is mainly based on the contact mode between the refrigeration liquid and the equipment.
Indirect contact liquid cooling, which is typically cold plate liquid cooling, fixes the equipment requiring heat dissipation on a cold plate, and the liquid takes away the heat of the equipment when passing through the cold plate, so as to achieve the purpose of heat dissipation. However, the hard disk, power supply and other components inside the chassis still need to rely on the fan to dissipate heat because they can't touch the liquid. This cold plate liquid cooling server has the advantages of limited impact on the data center architecture, low noise, high energy efficiency and controllable cost. For those data centers with high heat density, heat dissipation is more appropriate.
In addition, there is another way called immersion liquid cooling. This method is characterized by completely immersing it equipment such as servers that need heat dissipation in the coolant. Rely on the circulating flow of liquid to take away heat. This is also called direct contact liquid cooling. Generally speaking, the server is placed in a specially designed container. After taking away the heat, the coolant will be gasified, cooled by other devices and recycled. In this way, the cooling liquid is in full contact with the equipment, so the heat dissipation efficiency is higher. In addition, there is no fan, so the noise is lower than that of cold plate liquid cooling.
Although liquid cooling technology has many advantages, there are still some restrictive factors. Specifically, there are the following points:
1. Lack of corresponding standard support:
At present, immersion liquid cooling has not formed a trend in the industry, and there is a lack of cases of large-scale application. The national or industrial specifications for its technology are still limit.
2. High Cost:
The design of the data center using liquid cooling technology is very different from the traditional data center using air cooling. For example, the load-bearing of stairs and the floor height of machine room. If the cooling mode is replaced on a large scale, in addition to the impact on space utilization, personnel maintenance and reconstruction costs will also be a large expenditure.
3. Corrosion risk:
Water is conductive, and mineral oil and fluoride will be polluted by other substances after contacting with air, which will bring corrosion risk to it equipment such as servers. The prevention cost is very high.
Although there are still many problems with liquid cooling technology, thanks to its obvious advantages, with the continuous development and improvement of technology, it will certainly be useful in the construction of data center in the future.
