Introduction to Liquid Cooling Technology

Liquid cooling mainly refers to the use of liquid instead of air to take away the heat generated by heat-generating devices such as CPU, chipset, memory sticks, and expansion cards.

Liquid cooling can dissipate heat and cool the IT equipment in the data center, so as to realize the normal operation of the data center. A data center (DC for short) is a building site that provides an operating environment for centralized electronic information equipment, including a host computer room, an auxiliary area, a support area, and an administrative management area. As the underlying computing power infrastructure of artificial intelligence, 5G, cloud computing, and industrial Internet, the value of data centers has been greatly highlighted. The infrastructure that makes up the data center includes IT equipment such as servers and optical modules, and non-IT equipment such as power supplies, cooling, and cabinets. Cooling systems are critical components of data center infrastructure. The core device of the IT equipment in the data center is a semiconductor device, and the operation of the IT equipment will continue to generate heat. Therefore, a cooling system is required for heat dissipation and cooling to ensure the stability of the internal environment of the data center and realize the normal operation of the data center. The cooling technology used in the refrigeration system includes liquid cooling.

Comparison of 3 different liquid cooling methods

The cold plate liquid cooling has the highest maturity, and the immersion liquid cooling and spray liquid cooling have better energy-saving effects. At present, among the three different types of liquid cooling, the cold-plate liquid-cooled heating element does not need to contact the cooling liquid. It has the earliest development time and high technology maturity. The cold-plate liquid cooling adopts micro-channel enhanced heat transfer technology and has extremely high heat dissipation performance. It has been applied in the fields of military radar, high-density data center, high-performance computer, power battery and high-power LED heat dissipation. effect. Immersion liquid cooling has obvious advantages in heat dissipation and energy saving, and has been widely used in the fields of supercomputing and high-performance computing; there are relatively few research results and application practices of spray liquid cooling.