CHARACTERIZATION OF A COLD PLATE BY EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS AND POWER SAVINGS CALCULATION OF DYNAMIC COLD PLATE

Abstract

Cooling is a critical part of data center’s infrastructure, and with ongoing demands in data processing and storage, thermal management issues are of great concern. Some imperative methods of removing heat are either using air or liquid (preferably water or refrigerant). When high power densities modules are involved, liquid cooling addresses some of the problems faced by air cooling as liquid coolants have higher thermal capacitance. Also, in the case of multi-chip modules, a non-uniform heating due to multicore generates hotspots and increases temperature gradients across the module. A dynamic cold plate was developed to address these issues with the help of flow control devices. A temperature sensing self-regulated flow control device (FCD) is placed at the exit of each section to regulate the required flow. This thesis presents an experimental setup with two 240W heat sources cooled by Asetek cold plates connected in parallel to each other. The Performance characteristics of the Asetek cold plate is comprehensively studied by experimental testing. In addition to the experimental study, the computational results from the FCD are studied to estimate pumping power savings.