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.

Experimental adiabatic two-phase pressure drops data for refrigerants R134a, R236fa and R245fa during flow boiling in small channels with internal diameters of 1.03, 2.20 and 3.04 mm are presented. The main purpose was to investigate the effects of channel confinement on adiabatic two-phase pressure drops. Thus, the two-phase pressure drop trends were systematically investigated over a wide range of test conditions for all three refrigerants and channel sizes. Statistical comparisons have also been made by comparing the experimental pressure drop data database with various macroscale and microscale prediction methods from the literature. The comparison showed relatively moderate accuracy for three prediction methods developed for macroscale flows, i.e. Baroczy and Chisholm, Friedel and the homogeneous model with the Cicchitti et al. viscosity relation. As for microscale prediction methods, the Cioncolini et al. annular flow model worked best with 68.5% of the data within ± 30%, followed by the Sun and Mishima and the Zhang et al. methods. Combining this database with the LTCM lab’s earlier database for 0.509 and 0.790 mm channels, there appears to be no evidence of a macro-to-microscale transition, at least with respect to two-phase pressure drops.