Developed by the University of Alabama will help passive cooling systems for servers and ordinary PCs.

Immersion (immersion) cooling systems have been known for quite some time. At the same time, the proliferation of such systems and their introduction is not very active. Nevertheless, progress is still there, some data centers use immersion cooling systems, and do not plan to switch to the previous types of cooling systems.

Such systems typically use a Novec refrigerant, which is considered the undisputed leader. But there is nothing permanent, gradually alternative refrigerants appear. One of the new, promising projects is a passive cooling system based on Fluorinert Electronic Liquid FC-72 . This liquid does not conduct current plus is very stable (chemically and thermally). Here, immediately say that the developers use a cooling system that does not require immersing the entire server in a container with liquid. The authors of the project are employees of the University of Alabama, Huntsville (University of Alabama in Huntsville).

How it works?

The developers only cool the processor, as one of the hottest elements of the system (although, of course, it is not only the processor that heats up, especially in heavily loaded systems).
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The advantages of the cooling system, where Fluorinert Electronic Liquid FC-72 is used, is its complete passivity, without the need to use even a pump. Therefore, the energy for the system is not required. The second advantage arising from the previous one is the absence of moving parts, so the system can work for a very long time, the operating costs for maintenance will be minimal.



The system works as follows:

• A heated processor (or any other element) evaporates Fluorinert Electronic Liquid FC-72;
• The steam goes to the heat exchanger, from where the heat goes into the environment (air cooling);
• Fluorinert Electronic Liquid FC-72 condenses and flows into a storage tank;
• The liquid goes to the processor, and the cycle repeats.

It is still too early to talk about the practical implementation of such a cooling system in data centers, since the tests were carried out only for Intel Pentium 4 and Core i3 processors. But soon tests will be conducted in "field" conditions.

At the same time, three variants of such a system were developed at once, which were tested for 12 hours. According to the results, the developers chose one of the systems that showed maximum efficiency. This is a direct contact immersion system, which effectively stabilizes the processor temperature at 56 degrees Celsius.

The developers believe that the use of a passive cooling system, without fans, eliminates the need for frequent cleaning of dust from coolers.

The economy must be economical

According to the developers, their system, subject to mass implementation, will help manufacturers of computer systems (including servers) to save $ 540 million annually, as a result of not installing coolers and the need for energy supply.

System users in the United States alone will be able to save about $ 6.3 billion annually due to the lack of energy costs for computer cooling systems.

Of course, before the mass introduction of the cooling system of this type is still far, but the work is quite promising, so we can expect its further development. In addition, developers have already received a patent.