COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF FORM FACTOR OF 3RD GENERATION OPEN COMPUTE SERVERS USING DIFFERENT DIELECTRIC FLUIDS FOR SINGLE-PHASE IMMERSION COOLING

Computer system dependency has been increased in the modern world and that has encouraged the rapid growth of data centers in leading business units like banking, education, transportation, social media and many more. Data center is a facility that incorporates an organisation’s IT operations and equipment, as well as where it stores, processes, and manages the data. To fulfil the demands of data storage and data processing, corresponding increase in power density of servers are needed. The data center energy efficiency largely depends on the thermal management of servers. Currently, air cooling is the most widely used thermal management technique in data centers. But air cooling has started to reach its limitations due to high powered microprocessors and packaging. Therefore, industries are looking for single-phase immersion cooling using different dielectric fluids which reduces operational and cooling costs by enhancing the thermal management of servers. Form factor study of 3rd generation open compute server is another area of research in which impact of form factor (geometry of different Open Rack Units) on maximum junction temperature and thermal resistance at the server level is documented. This work is to provide an insight to increase the rack density by reducing form factor of an existing server. This work could open to more heat load per rack. A computational study is conducted in operational range of temperatures and the thermal efficiency has been optimized. A parametric study is conducted by changing the velocities and inlet temperatures of cooling liquid for different heights of the open compute 3rd generation server. The comparative study was carried out for white mineral oil and synthetic fluid(EC100). The results show an enhancement in thermal management for synthetic fluid when compared to mineral oil for the same inlet temperatures. This study clearly indicates that the single-phase immersion cooling is efficient and capable to accommodate high thermal mass.