Introduction Of Liquid Cooling Mode

In high-power products such as large servers, liquid cooling technology is widely used. Liquid cooling technology is to use a liquid with a high specific heat capacity as a heat transfer tool to transfer the heat generated when a high-power product is running, so that the product can operate normally.

According to the contact method between the liquid and the heating device, liquid cooling is mainly divided into cold plate liquid cooling and immersion liquid cooling.

Cold plate liquid cooling

The main heating element of cold plate liquid cooling is fixed on the liquid cold plate, and the liquid flowing through the liquid cold plate takes away the heat to achieve the purpose of heat dissipation. It is a typical indirect contact liquid cooling. Since other heating components such as hard disks and power supplies still require fans to drive air to dissipate heat, the current cold-plate liquid-cooled server is also called a gas-liquid dual-channel server. The development of cold plate liquid cooling technology is relatively mature. IBM and domestic Sugon respectively demonstrated their cold plate liquid cooling servers and applications. The cold-plate liquid-cooled server has little effect on the current data center architecture. It has the characteristics of low noise, high energy efficiency, and low total cost of ownership, and can solve the heat dissipation problem of higher heat density data centers.

Submerged liquid cooling

Immersion liquid cooling, as the name implies, immerses the heating element in the cooling liquid, and relies on the flow of the liquid to take away the heat generated by the operation of the chip. Immersion liquid cooling is a typical direct contact liquid cooling. The current popular method is to immerse the server in a specially designed cabinet. However, this architecture reduces the space utilization of the data center building. Some manufacturers have custom-designed a shell for servers, which wraps each server and coolant, and optimizes space utilization without changing the existing data center deployment architecture. Since the heating element is in direct contact with the coolant, the immersion liquid cooling has higher heat dissipation efficiency. Compared with the cold plate liquid cooling, it has lower noise (no fan at all), can solve the situation of higher heat density, and is more energy-saving.