Power densification and rising module heat losses cannot be managed by traditional “external-to-case” cooling solutions. This is especially pronounced in high voltage systems, where intervening layers of insulating material between the power devices and cooling solution need to be sufficiently thick to provide adequate voltage isolation. As operating voltages increase, the required thicknesses for these insulating layers become so large that they limit the ability to extract the heat. A direct cooling approach that addresses voltage separation issues represents a unique opportunity to deliver coolant to the hottest regions, while opening up the opportunity for increased scaling of power electronics modules. However technical concerns about long-term performance of coolants and their voltage isolation characteristics coupled with integration challenges impede adoption. Here, the reliability and performance of voltage blocking strategies, namely dielectric fluids and dielectric surface coatings, are examined to advance the feasibility of a direct cooling approach for improved thermal management of high-voltage, high-power module. The breakdown voltage of the dielectric fluid is characterized through relevant temperatures, flow, and electric fields with the ultimate goal of developing design rules for direct integrated cooling schemes. The development and electrical characterization of conformal dielectric surface coatings to provide further protection of the electronics is also undertaken. Results showed the ability for layers of Parylene C to maintain their insulating capacity when subject to E-fields as high as 33.5V/μm.

This paper advances the state-of-the-art in novel passive two-phase systems for more efficient cooling of datacenters and telecom central offices compared to the traditional air-based cooling solutions (e.g. aisle-based containment systems). The proposed passive two-phase technology uses numerous server-level thermosyphons to dissipate the heat generated by critical components, such as central processing units, accelerators, etc., with the flexibility of selecting the rack-level and room-level cooling elements depending on the deployment scenarios. The main goal of this paper is to experimentally investigate the thermal performance and maximum heat removal capability of a server-level thermosyphon for cooling compact servers. The experimental apparatus, built at Nokia Bell Labs, incorporates a single 7-cm high liquid-cooled thermosyphon that fits within a 2U server (smaller form factors can be achieved by a proper design that would further reduce the thermosyphon’s height). The heat source is represented by a pseudo-chip, composed of six parallel cartridge heaters installed in a copper block that incorporates local temperature measurements and is able of dissipating a total power of ≈ 500 W over a footprint area of 3.5 cm × 3.5 cm (corresponding heat flux of ≈ 41 W/cm 2 ). Steady-state experiments were carried out at various heat loads up to 240 W (corresponding heat flux of ≈ 20 W/cm 2 ), filling ratios and secondary side inlet conditions (coolant temperatures and mass flow rates), using R1234ze(E) and deionized water as the working fluids on the primary and secondary side, respectively. Test results demonstrate high heat transfer performance of the server-level thermosyphon over a wide range of conditions, and operating points are identified and classified into an operational map. Thermosyphon-based cooling systems across multiple length scales can significantly improve operation in terms of lowering energy consumption, allowing for higher hardware density, increased processing speed and reliability.

The demand for high power density, therefore high heat dissipation, power electronics modules is propelled by applications such as hybrid transportation and asynchronous power generation, among others. Besides a low thermal resistance, these applications require high thermal capacitance to manage transient operations. The Package Integrated Cyclone COoler (PICCO) is an additively manufactured, thermal energy storing cooler codesigned by GE Research (GRC) in collaboration with the US Army Research Lab (ARL). The key aspect of PICCO is its capability to swirl a two-phase coolant, i.e. liquid-gas. The centrifugal field creates a radial pressure gradient inducing buoyancy. The strong radial acceleration to which the fluid is subject forces relatively cold flow outward to reach the hot wall, thus boosting the heat transfer, while hot flow and bubbles migrate inward and the two-phase system is nearly isothermal (thermal storage). The proposed study models the swirled flow in terms of liquid film heat conductance and critical heat flux predictions. The resulting heat transfer coefficient can be applied to the walls of the cyclone and used as a boundary condition for the heat conduction problem through the cyclone wall and the module layers.

Monitoring and predicting temperatures at critical locations of a power electronic system is important for safety, reliability and efficiency. As the market share of vehicles with electric powertrains continue to increase, there is also an important economic cost of failing electronic components. For inverters present in such a drive system, exceeding the temperature limit for certain critical components, such as DC-link capacitors and Silicon carbide MOSFETs, can lead to failure of the system. In such an application, extracting the temperatures using sensors from locations such as dies and capacitors require expensive modifications and poses technical challenges. It is therefore necessary to create a thermal model for the inverter system to estimate the temperature at various components in order to ensure operation within temperature limits. The model approach is also suitable for predicting the effect on the component temperature and reliability of boundary conditions such as coolant, ambient temperature and mission profile. This study assesses the reliability of a 250 kW liquid cooled inverter system designed for traction application. The critical failure areas are the DC-link capacitors, and the SiC MOSFET dies which are rated at 175 degrees C. The system is modeled as a compact system by reasonably considering each component as a lumped capacitance and estimating the thermal resistance using physical dimensions. Results from the model are then compared against experimental data from constant power testing, and good agreement is observed for the cold plate and gate driver temperatures. With the model fidelity established, the model is then used to implement drive cycles from the Environmental Protection Agency for nonroad applications. The resulting temperature profile for each component are a series of temperature peaks and troughs that contribute to damage and failure. Rainflow counting algorithm is then used to quantify the damage per mini-cycles, and used to estimate the predicted life for each component based on their manufacturer provided reliability qualification and the mission profile is executed on the test bench for validation. The results are then used to generate a system risk matrix that relates the failure risk associated with a certain mission profile and the cooling scheme. It therefore demonstrates that an automotive inverter with SiC switching devices can be credibly assessed for failure risk using a compact model that is independent of boundary conditions, in combination with established reliability correlations and techniques.

The demand for high power density, therefore high heat dissipation, silicon carbide power electronics modules is propelled by applications such as hybrid transportation and renewable power generation and conversion, among others. Besides a low thermal resistance, these applications require high thermal capacitance to manage transient operations. The Package Integrated Cyclone COoler (PICCO) is an additively manufactured, thermal energy storing cooler codesigned by GE Research (GRC) in collaboration with the US Army Research Lab (ARL). The key aspect of PICCO is its capability to swirl a two-phase coolant, i.e. liquid-gas. The centrifugal field creates a radial pressure gradient inducing buoyancy. The strong radial acceleration to which the fluid is subject forces relatively cold flow outward to reach the hot wall, thus boosting the heat transfer, while hot flow and bubbles migrate inward and the two-phase system is nearly isothermal (thermal storage). In this paper, we introduce a novel power module package which brings together silicon carbide devices, Power OverLay (POL) wirebondless interconnect, and two-phase swirling flow in an additively manufactured cooler. Various embodiments of this power module structure are presented along with a discussion on their thermal behavior when subjected to a hybrid vehicle drive cycle.

Along with advancements in microelectronics packaging, the power density of processor units has steadily increased over time. Data center servers equipped for high performance computing (HPC) often use multiple central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs), thereby resulting in an increased power density, exceeding 1 kW per U. Many data center organizations are evaluating single phase immersion technology as a potential energy and resource saving cooling option. In this work immersion cooling was studied at a power level of 2.7kW/U with a 5U-height immersion cooling tank. Heat generated by a simulated GPU server was transferred to the secondary loop coolant, and then exchanged with the primary loop facility coolant through the heat exchanger. The chiller supply and return temperature and flow rate was controlled for the primary loop. The simulated GPU server chassis was designed to provide thermal power equivalent to a high power density server. Eight simulated power heaters, of which each unit was the size of a GPU chipset, was assembled in the comparable location to a real IT equipment on a 4U server chassis. Power for the GPU simulated chassis was able to support up to 2700 W maximum. Three investigations for this immersion cooling system evaluation were performed through comprehensive testing. The first is to identify the key decision making factor(s) for evaluating the thermal performance of 4 hydrocarbon-based dielectric coolants, including power parametric analysis, transient analysis, power cycling test, and fluid temperature profiling. The second is to develop an optimization strategy for the immersion system thermal performance. The third is to verify the capability of an 1U heat sink to support high density processor units over 300 W per GPU in an immersion cooling solution.

The main objective of this paper is to utilize an improved version of the simulator presented at InterPACK 2017 to design a thermosyphon system for energy-efficient heat removal from 2-U servers used in high-power datacenters. Currently, between 25% and 45% of the total energy consumption of a datacenter (this number does not include the energy required to drive the fans at the server-level) is dedicated to cooling, and with a predicted annual growth rate of about 15% (or higher) coupled with the plan of building numerous new datacenters to handle the “big data” storage and processing demands of emerging 5G networks, artificial intelligence, electrical vehicles, etc., the development of novel, high efficiency cooling technologies becomes extremely important for curbing the use of energy in datacenters. Notably, going from air cooling to two-phase cooling, not only enables the possibility to handle the ever higher heat fluxes and heat loads of new servers, but it also provides an energy-efficient solution to be implemented for all servers of a datacenter to reduce the total energy consumption of the entire cooling system. In that light, a pseudo-chip with a footprint area of 4 × 4 cm 2 and a maximum power dissipation of 300 W (corresponding heat flux of about 19 W/cm 2 ), will be assumed as a target design for our novel thermosyphon-based cooling system. The simulator will be first validated against an independent database and then used to find the optimal design of the chip’s thermosyphon. The results demonstrate the capability of this simulator to model all of the thermosyphon’s components (evaporator, condenser, riser and downcomer) together with overall thermal performance and creation of operational maps. Additionally, the simulator is used here to design two types of passive two-phase systems, an air- and a liquid-cooled thermosyphon, which will be compared in terms of thermal-hydraulic performance. Finally, the simulator will be used to perform a sensitivity analysis on the secondary coolant side conditions (inlet temperature and mass flow rate) to evaluate their effect on the system performance.

This work experimentally studies the impact of facility cooling failure of a direct liquid cooling (DLC) system on the IT equipment (ITE). The facility side of a DLC system removes the heat from a secondary loop — in direct contact with the ITE — and discard it in a chiller loop or ambient. The CPU utilization and coolant set point temperature (SPT) are varied to understand the effect of failure under different operating conditions. The ITE response is studied in terms of chip temperature and power, and fan speed. It was found that failure of the facility cooling system is not hazardous to the IT operation. The rate of change in temperature after failure is low and is sufficient to turn the ITE off safely. This is attributed to the surrounding air in the data center and the thermal mass of the cooling system.

As global demand for data centers grows, so does the size and load placed on data centers, leading constraints on power and space available to the operator. Cooling power consumption is a major part of the data center energy usage. Liquid cooling technology has emerged as a viable solution in the process of optimization of the energy consumed per performance unit. In this data center rack level evaluation, 2OU (Open U) hybrid (liquid+air) cooled web servers are tested to observe the effects of warm water cooling on the server component temperatures, IT power and cooling power. The study discusses the importance of variable speed pumping in a centralized coolant configuration system. The cooling setup includes a mini rack capable of housing up to eleven hybrid cooled web servers and two heat exchangers that exhaust the heat dissipated from the servers to the environment (the test rig data center room). The centralized configuration has two redundant pumps placed in series with heat exchanger at the rack. Each server is equipped with two passive (i.e. no active pump) cold plates for cooling the CPUs while rests of the components are air cooled. Synthetic stress load has been generated on each server using stress-testing tools. Pumps in the servers are separately powered using an external power supply. The pump speed is proportional to the voltage across the armature [1]. The pump rpm has been recorded with input voltages ranging from 11V to 17V. The servers are tested for higher inlet temperatures ranging from 25°C to 45°C which falls within the ASHRAE liquid cooled envelope W4 [2]. Variable pumping has been achieved by using different input voltages at respective inlet temperatures.

In this paper, the impact of direct liquid cooling (DLC) system failure on the IT equipment is studied experimentally. The main factors that are anticipated to affect the IT equipment response during failure are the CPU utilization, coolant set point temperature (SPT) and the server type. These factors are varied experimentally and the IT equipment response is studied in terms of chip temperature and power, CPU utilization and total server power. It was found that failure of the cooling system is hazardous and can lead to data center shutdown in less than a minute. Additionally, the CPU frequency throttling mechanism was found to be vital to understand the change in chip temperature, power, and utilization. Other mechanisms associated with high temperatures were also observed such as the leakage power and the fans speed change. Finally, possible remedies are proposed to reduce the probability and the consequences of the cooling system failure.

Modern day data centers are operated at high power for increased power density, maintenance, and cooling which covers almost 2 percent (70 billion kilowatt-hours) of the total energy consumption in the US. IT components and cooling system occupy the major portion of this energy consumption. Although data centers are designed to perform efficiently, cooling the high-density components is still a challenge. So, alternative methods to improve the cooling efficiency has become the drive to reduce the cooling cost. As liquid cooling is more efficient for high specific heat capacity, density, and thermal conductivity, hybrid cooling can offer the advantage of liquid cooling of high heat generating components in the traditional air-cooled servers. In this experiment, a 1U server is equipped with cold plate to cool the CPUs while the rest of the components are cooled by fans. In this study, predictive fan and pump failure analysis are performed which also helps to explore the options for redundancy and to reduce the cooling cost by improving cooling efficiency. Redundancy requires the knowledge of planned and unplanned system failures. As the main heat generating components are cooled by liquid, warm water cooling can be employed to observe the effects of raised inlet conditions in a hybrid cooled server with failure scenarios. The ASHRAE guidance class W4 for liquid cooling is chosen for our experiment to operate in a range from 25°C – 45°C. The experiments are conducted separately for the pump and fan failure scenarios. Computational load of idle, 10%, 30%, 50%, 70% and 98% are applied while powering only one pump and the miniature dry cooler fans are controlled externally to maintain constant inlet temperature of the coolant. As the rest of components such as DIMMs & PCH are cooled by air, maximum utilization for memory is applied while reducing the number fans in each case for fan failure scenario. The components temperatures and power consumption are recorded in each case for performance analysis.

Nowadays, datacenters heat density dissipation follows an exponential increasing trend that is reaching the heat removal limits of the traditional air-cooling technology. Two-phase cooling implemented within a gravity-driven system represents a scalable and viable long-term solution for datacenter cooling in order to increase the heat density dissipation with larger energy efficiency and lower acoustic noise. The present article builds upon the 4-part set of papers presented at ITHERM 2016 for a 15-cm height thermosyphon to cool a contemporary datacenter cabinet, providing new test data over a wider range of heat fluxes and new validations of the thermal-hydrodynamics of our thermosyphon simulation code. The thermosyphon consists of a microchannel evaporator connected via a riser and a downcomer to a liquid-cooled condenser for the cooling of a pseudo-chip to emulate an actual server. Test results demonstrated good thermal performance coupled with uniform flow distribution for the new larger range of operating test conditions. At the maximum imposed heat load of 158 W (corresponding to a heat flux of 70 W cm −2 ) with a water inlet coolant at 20 °C, water mass flow rate of 12 kg h −1 and thermosyphon filling ratio of 78%, the pseudo mean chip temperature was found to be 58 °C and is well below the normal thermal limits in datacenter cooling. Finally, the in-house LTCM’s thermosyphon simulation code was validated against an expanded experimental database of about 262 data points, demonstrating very good agreement; in fact, the pseudo mean chip temperature was predicted with an error band of about 1 K.

As technological advances lead to miniaturization of high power electronics, the concentration of heat generating components per area increases to the point of requiring innovative, integrated cooling solutions to maintain operational temperatures. Traditional coolant pumps have many moving parts, making them susceptible to mechanical failure and requiring periodic maintenance. Such devices are too complex to be miniaturized and embedded in small scale systems. Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) conduction pumps offer an alternative way of generating fluid flow in small scales for use in modern thermal control systems for high power electronics, both for terrestrial and aerospace applications. In EHD conduction, the interaction between an applied electrical field and the dissociation of electrolyte species in a dielectric fluid generates an accumulation of space charge near the electrodes, known as heterocharge layers. These layers apply electric body forces in the fluid, resulting in a flow in the desired direction based on the pump characteristics. EHD conduction pumps work with dielectric fluids and have simple, flexible designs with no moving parts. These pumps have very low power consumption, operate reliably for longer periods than mechanical pumps, and have the ability to operate in microgravity. EHD conduction pumps have been previously proven effective for heat transfer enhancement in multiple size scales, but were only studied in a flush ring or flush flat electrode configurations at the micro-scale. This study provides the pressure and flow rate generation performance characterization for a micro-scale pump with perforated electrodes, designed to be manufactured and assembled using innovative techniques, and incorporated into an evaporator embedded in an electronic cooling system. The performance of the pump is numerically simulated based on the fully coupled equations of the EHD conduction model, showcasing the distinctive heterocharge layer structure and subsequent force generation unique to this innovative design.

The recent years have witnessed the tremendous development in electronics with high power density, such as highly integrated chips and high power LEDs. As a result, the continuous increase in power consumption of electronics is gradually leading to an urgent need for high performance cooling strategies. Among the existed cooling methods, liquid cooling has been proved to be a kind of effective cooling technology for the removal of a large amount of heat from high power devices. Traditional liquid cooling technique commonly refers to utilizing water as the coolant, which is low cost and owns a relatively higher specific heat capacity, however, lower convective coefficient. On the contrary, liquid metal owns much higher convective coefficient, however, lower specific heat capacity. In addition, the higher cost of liquid metal also limits its utilization with large quantity in electronic cooling areas. In this study, a hybrid mini/micro-channel heat sink, based on both of liquid metal and water, was demonstrated. The new system combines the advantages of the two coolants. Experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the capability of the cooling performances of the hybrid system under different operation conditions, including different flow rates, flow directions, pump failure and thermal shock. The experimental results indicate that the hybrid mini/micro channel heat sink owns better cooling performance than water-based heat sink.

The room temperature liquid metal cooling is quickly emerging as a powerful way for the thermal management in many advanced high heat flux devices, spanning from electronics, optoelectronics, battery, to power system etc. Except for its pretty high conductivity that a metal coolant could offer, the unique merit lying behind this new generation cooling strategy is its drivability of the highly conductive coolant through the electromagnetic effect where no moving elements are involved and thus only very few energy consumption is needed. In addition, even waste heat could be strong enough to generate applicable electricity for such flow driving purpose. More directly, the temperature gradient intrinsically generated between the heat source and the sink has also been managed to drive the flow of the coolant and realize an automatic practical enough cooling in some situations. All these practices lead to a totally noiseless pumping of the heat delivery and a compact and reliable cooling modular can thus be possible. Starting from this basic point, we are dedicated here to present an overview on the art and science in developing the technical strategies for a smart driving of the liquid metal cooling of the target devices. Designing philosophy for an innovated thermal management will be discussed. Particularly, electromagnetic pumping, waste thermoelectricity driving, thermosyphon flow effect, etc. will be comparatively evaluated with each of the working performances interpreted. Power consumption rate and efficiency will be quantitatively digested. Typical application examples in the cooling of a series of device areas will be illustrated. Further improvement on the cooling solution along this category will be suggested. Challenging issues in pushing the new technology into large scale utilization will be raised. It is expected that such silent self-driving of the liquid metal coolant will find unique and important values in a wide variety of thermal management areas where reliability, compactness, low noise and energy saving are urgently requested.

The heat dissipated by electronic equipment inside data centers is increasing at a rapid rate due to the increasing of performance requirement and package density. This ever increasing power leads to critical challenges of thermal management for these high power density data centers. Energy consumption is also a key issue for high density data centers. Roughly 1.5% of all U.S. electricity consumption in the year 2006 was related to data centers, while that number increased to 2% by the year 2010. In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed approximately 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. This amount of the electricity equals the annual output of 34 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants [1]. Cooling systems constitute a significant portion of the energy consumption of data centers, being approximately 25%∼35% of the total energy usage. Therefore, there is a large potential to save energy by optimizing current existing cooling systems and investigating new cooling technologies, and, at the same time, improving the overall cooling capacity and efficiency. This paper describes and investigates a hybrid cooling technology which utilizes in row coolers in existing raised floor air cooled data centers. The in row cooler functions as a liquid-to-air heat exchanger. In addition to the traditional raised floor cold aisle-hot aisle arrangements, the in row cooler is installed between the IT equipment to enable delivering the liquid coolant medium closer to the IT equipment. The in row coolers intake the hot air from the hot aisle, condition it, and supply the chilled air to the cold aisle. Thus, by extracting a large portion of the heat more directly into the cooling liquid through the in row coolers compared with the perimeter CRAH unit, the overall cooling performance and efficiency can potentially be improved. CFD models for an in row cooler and a representative data center room are developed. Experimentally characterized performance data are used to calibrate and validate the models. The models are then used to conduct a detailed computational analysis to assess the effectiveness of different arrangement configurations of in row cooler units in two rows of racks along one cold aisle. The detailed performance of the entire cold aisle is characterized using the rack inlet air temperature and a temperature nonuniformity factor. The impact of CRAH location and room layout are also investigated. This study is based on a practical problem and the corresponding results and analysis provide basic installation and design guidelines for future equipment upgrading in certain parts of the data center.

Efficient and compact cooling technologies play a pivotal role in determining the performance of high performance computing devices when used with highly parallel workloads in supercomputers. The present work deals with evaluation of different cooling technologies and elucidating their impact on the power, performance, and thermal management of Intel ® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. The scope of the study is to demonstrate enhanced cooling capabilities beyond today’s fan-driven air-cooling for use in high performance computing (HPC) technology, thereby improving the overall Performance per Watt in datacenters. The various cooling technologies evaluated for the present study include air-cooling, liquid-cooling and two-phase immersion-cooling. Air-cooling is evaluated by providing controlled airflow to a cluster of eight 300 W Xeon Phi coprocessors (7120P). For liquid-cooling, two different cold plate technologies are evaluated, viz, Formed tube cold pates and Microchannel based cold plates. Liquidcooling with water as working fluid, is evaluated on single Xeon Phi coprocessors, using inlet conditions in accordance with ASHRAE W2 and W3 class liquid cooled datacenter baselines. For immersion-cooling, a cluster of multiple Xeon Phi coprocessors is evaluated, with three different types of Integrated Heat Spreaders (IHS), viz., bare IHS, IHS with a Boiling Enhancement Coating (BEC) and IHS with BEC coated pin-fins. The entire cluster is immersed in a pool of Novec 649 (3M fluid, boiling point 49 °C at 1 atm), with polycarbonate spacers used to reduce the volume of fluid required, to achieve target fluid/power density of ∼ 3 L/kW. Flow visualization is performed to provide further insight into the boiling behavior during the immersion-cooling process. Performance per Watt of the Xeon Phi coprocessors is characterized as a function of the cooling technologies using several HPC workloads benchmark run at constant frequency, such as the Intel proprietary Power Thermal Utility (PTU), and industry standard HPC benchmarks LINPACK, DGEMM, SGEMM and STREAM. The major parameters measured by sensors on the coprocessor include total power to the coprocessor, CPU temperature, and memory temperature, while the calculated outputs of interest also include the performance per watt and equivalent thermal resistance. As expected, it is observed that both liquid and immersion cooling show improved performance per Watt and lower CPU temperature compared to air-cooling. In addition to elucidating the performance/watt improvement, this work reports on the relationship of cooling technologies on total power consumed by the Xeon-Phi card as a function of coolant inlet temperatures. Further, the paper discusses form-factor advantages to liquid and immersion cooling and compares technologies on a common platform. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing datacenter optimization for cooling in the context of leakage power control for Xeon-Phi coprocessors.

High performance computing server racks are being engineered to contain significantly more processing capability within the same computer room footprint year after year. The processor density within a single rack is becoming high enough that traditional, inefficient air-cooling of servers is inadequate to sustain HPC workloads. Experiments that characterize the performance of a direct water-cooled server rack in an operating HPC facility are described in this paper. Performance of the rack is reported for a range of cooling water inlet temperatures, flow rates and workloads that include actual and worst-case synthetic benchmarks. Power and temperature measurements of all processors and memory components in the rack were made while extended benchmark tests were conducted throughout the range of cooling variables allowed within an operational HPC facility. Synthetic benchmark results were compared with those obtained on a single server of the same design that had been characterized thermodynamically. Neither actual nor synthetic benchmark performances were affected during the course of the experiments, varying less than 0.13 percent. Power consumption change in the rack was minimal for the entire excursion of coolant temperatures and flow rates. Establishing the characteristics of such a highly energy efficient server rack in situ is critical to determine how the technology might be integrated into an existing heterogeneous, hybrid cooled computing facility — i.e., a facility that includes some servers that are air cooled as well as some that are direct water cooled.

Liquid immersion cooling technology, currently in its nascence as a commercially available solution for data center installations, is growing in popularity as the power density of next-gen electronics necessitates a matriculation to thermal management techniques capable of handling incredibly high heat fluxes reliably and efficiently. The use of boiling and single-phase convective solutions using dielectric fluids can result in dramatic reductions in chip temperatures, thus increasing reliability. The latter method is growing in popularity faster than the former but, as both of these approaches gain acceptance, packaging engineers will require insight into how coolant is distributed throughout the enclosure for either solution. More specifically, analytical and experimental techniques will be required to ascertain how thermal performance and system efficiency of more critical elements, such as processor chips, are affected by the auxiliary components, heated or not, that must exist within a computing device. These supplemental components, whether entirely passive or modestly heated, if placed strategically can be integrated in such a way to improve the thermal performance of the system by guiding the coolant through the liquid filled enclosure. To this end, flow guides, which simulate these auxiliary components, have been integrated into a small form factor high performance server module. The relationship between the surface temperature and the power dissipated by the primary heated elements within the device has been explored as well as the pressure drop experienced by the coolant flowing through the enclosure. Power dissipations near 450W have been achieved at a surface temperature of approximately 75°C with the use of flow guides, a near 50W improvement over previous results. Furthermore, this value was attained at a modest pressure drop of 0.71 psi for the dielectric fluid flowing through the cartridge. Slightly over 300W of power dissipation was achieved at an even lower pressure drop of 0.13 psi at a similar operating temperature. Pool boiling results have shown that passive elements can have a significant impact on thermal performance. Reductions of nearly 50W in the maximum power dissipation achieved have been shown when the largest flow guide is integrated. A PIV analytical method is proposed and applied to the current experimental facility to assess the effectiveness of the flow guide design proposed.

An evaluation of two approaches to localized hotspot cooling is conducted through both numerical modeling and experimental demonstration, with the advantages and limitations of each approach highlighted. The first approach, locally increasing the density of pins in a micro pin fin heat sink, was shown through numerical modeling to deliver a factor of two enhancement in effective heat transfer coefficient by doubling the pin density near the hotspot. This simpler approach to maintaining temperature uniformity eliminates the need for hotspot specific fluid routing and delivery, and also has minimal impact on the larger flow field. Dedicated hotspot coolers, on the other hand, have the ability to dissipate significantly larger heat fluxes while maintaining manageable pressure drops, because the flow rate to the dedicated cooler can be closely matched to the demands of the hotspot. Dissipation of hotspot heat fluxes in excess of 2 kW/cm 2 is demonstrated experimentally using a two phase dedicated hotspot cooler. However, dedicated coolers require additional fluidic routing and manifolding to efficiently deliver the coolant to the hotspot. These integration concerns are considered in concert with the performance of the hotspot cooler itself to enable better informed thermal design for both system level and device level cooling.