In today’s world, most data centers have multiple racks with numerous servers in each of them. The high amount of heat dissipation has become the largest server-level cooling problem for the data centers. The higher dissipation required, the higher is the total energy required to run the data center. Although still the most widely used cooling methodology, air cooling has reached its cooling capabilities especially for High-Performance Computing data centers. Liquid-cooled servers have several advantages over their air-cooled counterparts, primarily of which are high thermal mass, lower maintenance and eventually lower costs by maintenance by labor. Nano-fluids have been used in the past for improving the thermal efficiency of traditional dielectric coolants in the power electronics and automotive industry. Nanofluids have shown great promise in improving the convective heat transfer properties of the coolants due to a proven increase in thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity.

                The present research investigates the thermal enhancement of the performance of glycol-based dielectric coolant with Al~2~O~3~ nanoparticles for a higher heat transfer from the server cold plates. Detailed 3-D modeling of a commercial cold plate is completed and the CFD analysis is done in a commercially available CFD code ANSYS FLUENT. Nanoparticle transport is simulated using the Discrete Phase Modeling approach that calculates the particle trajectories by superimposing the calculated particle tracks on to the solved continuous phase flow field. The obtained results compare the improvement in heat transfer due to improvement in coolant properties with data available in the literature.


CFD Analysis on Liquid Cooled Cold Plate Using Copper Nanoparticles

Division / Sponsors: 
Electronic & Photonic Packaging Division (EPPD)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/InterPACK/InterPACK2020/volume/84041

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