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I'm confused, or maybe The Register's article is. It states "boffins at Leeds University and British start-up Icetope have invented a super cooling liquid", but
by moreati 14y ago
I'm confused, or maybe The Register's article is. It states "boffins at Leeds University and British start-up Icetope have invented a super cooling liquid", but also refers to "Dunking servers in new magic liquid 3M Novec" and has no mention of phase change/evaporation.
Are we talking about a single liquid? Did 3M license the formula from Leeds Uni/Icetope?
I'll try to understand it better this evening
- uvdiv 14y agoI think I was wrong. There's only one coolant (or coolant family), but several server-cooling systems. There are both liquid and phase-change systems, and I'm not sure which this is. 3M is the chemical firm which developed the coolant ("Novec"). Leeds/Iceotope is a customer: "UK company Iceotope, that patented liquid cooling for servers in the data center back in 2009, has released new products to market that use 3M’s Novec, an engineered non-flammable solvent it says makes the cooling process safer." http://blog.iceotope.com/2012/03/iceotope-liquid-cools-cabinets-and.html http://blog.iceotope.com/2012/03/iceotope-liquid-cools-cabin... 3M is also developing a server cooling system, independent of Leeds/Iceotope. This is the one in this press release, and I was mistaken to identify the one with the other. http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NA-DataCenters/DataCenters/AboutUs/3MInnovation/ http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NA-DataCenters/D... The 3M system is phase-change. I'm no longer sure what the Register is writing about, but Iceotope is researching both liquid and phase-change systems: "Iceotope Ltd, registered in Guernsey, is a technology company that researches and develops liquid and phase change cooling solutions based around heat pipe encapsulation." http://blog.iceotope.com/2011/12/assets-of-green-data-centre-specialist.html http://blog.iceotope.com/2011/12/assets-of-green-data-centre... Here's their liquid cooling system. One property of these coolants is their very low boiling point. That's useful for phase-change cooling. Another is that they have very high thermal expansivity, which means that they convect strongly as liquids (without phase change). That's useful for strictly liquid cooling. http://blog.iceotope.com/2012/09/liquid-cooling-halves-data-centre-power.html http://blog.iceotope.com/2012/09/liquid-cooling-halves-data-... They say the convection is 20-40x stronger than water, and overall heat removal 10-15x better. Since the Register article is saying "a thousand times" better heat conduction, I think they're taking about a phase change system. At least for that specific figure.
- moreati 14y agoThank you for digging deeper. Novec bears further watching. Iceotope are a bit odd, their website is just press release after press release.