New Thermal Management Systems for Data Centers

The almost half amount of power consumption in data centers which has been increasing drastically in late years is due to air conditioner for cooling down the data centers. The present authors proposed new thermal management systems for data centers aiming for the data centers without air conditioning, and R&D subjects have been conducted under the so called Green IT Project sponsored by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization). In this system, three liquid cooling methods for CPUs have been developed simultaneously, which are two types of direct liquid cooling with single-phase or two-phase heat exchanger and an indirect liquid cooling with high performance thin heat pipes. To establish this system, five R&D subjects have been conducted. In this paper, current progress of these subjects such as development of heat transfer components, verification test using real server racks, and nanofluids technology for heat transfer enhancement is reported.