Performance Evaluation of Plate-fin and Pin-fin Heat Sinks for The Application of Oil Immersion Cooling and Design Optimization of Dynamic Cold Plate for The Application of Warm Water Cooling

Abstract

In IT industries, to keep server rooms and data centers cool is a constant challenge for hardware developers and the cooling solution providers. Air cooling is the most widely used approach for thermal management of servers in data centers from many years. However, the scenario is changing gradually as the computational ability of data center is increasing exponentially. Because of increasing computational ability, the heat generated by the servers is increased in such amount that air cooling is not as efficient as it was before. Hence, alternative cooling system is required. In 1970’s the idea of liquid cooling was introduced. Liquid cooling can be decided in two different parts. First is water cooling and oil cooling. The study in this thesis is based on both the system. Firstly, for warm water cooling, this study presents the optimization of the cold plate cover. By optimizing this design, the efficiency of the cooling system can be improvised. Secondly, in oil immersed cooling, the purpose of the study of these heat sinks is to document the performance characteristic of both the heat sink as it was not studied before for the oil immersed cooling application.