Home / Immersion Cooling

What is immersion cooling?

Immersion cooling is a highly efficient cooling solution that involves submerging servers in a non-conductive fluid. This fluid absorbs the heat generated by the servers, allowing for highly efficient cooling. Immersion cooling can significantly reduce energy consumption and operating costs, while also improving cooling capacity and IT reliability.

Immersion Cooling is a unique natural convection-based technology achieved by the circulation of a di-electric liquid. The single-phased system completely immerses IT equipment in hydrocarbon fluid, ensuring all heat generated by the equipment is captured in the liquid. This fully integrated solution includes immersed application centric server platforms optimized for synergy and performance.

This ground-breaking cooling system for data center is the ultimate solution to the growing demand for sustainable high-density and energy efficient data centers. The first of this cooling system for data center is in Hong Kong, the new solution significantly reduces data center energy consumption and provides more reliable performance. It marks a groundbreaking shift for a heavy energy-consuming industry towards a greener future by adopting innovative, sustainable technologies and practices. By transitioning to Immersion Cooling, data centers will be future ready while managing costs and the impact on our environment. The industry will then enter what would otherwise be impossible — a new era of data centers.

Why is immersion cooling important for data centers?

The energy consumption of a data center is a significant resource that should not be overlooked. IT equipment consumes most of the energy resources, with the power consumption through the servers being dissipated as heat.

In recent years, advances in AI, IoT and machine learning, combined with increased computing power and performance requirements, have led to a higher server rack density – a particularly dire problem with Hong Kong’s land constraints. The result has been an upsurge in heat generated by traditional data centers, with cooling systems for data center correspondingly consuming significantly more energy at greater cost.

By contrast, immersion cooling solutions are widely recognized as a cooling system for data centers for their reliability and energy and cost efficiency. They are also conveniently scalable to any size of data center.

Immersion cooling – also known as direct liquid cooling – is an innovative cooling solution that brings significant advantages over traditional air-cooling techniques, especially when applied to high-density environments such as data centers. For facilities that feature extremely high-density racks (typically over 30 kW), air cooling simply is not sufficient to maintain the reliability of IT systems, no matter how new or optimized they may be. For such facilities (rack power requirements are approaching close to 20 kW in many facilities, and many organizations are looking to deploy racks with requirements of 50kW or more), liquid cooling is not a choice, but a necessity.

With immersion cooling, the rack is designed specifically so that servers are inserted vertically. An immersion tank houses the servers in a dielectric bath, and utilizing a CDU, circulates cooling fluid to remove heat.

Challenges for Immersion Cooling Adoption

The current challenge for immersion cooling adoption can be attributed to several factors, including:

Infrastructure Design

Immersion cooling requires a different infrastructure design compared to traditional air-cooled data centers. This means that retrofitting existing data centers to accommodate immersion cooling may not be feasible or may require significant modifications.

Customization

Immersion cooling solutions are often highly customized and tailored to specific hardware configurations. This means that integrating new hardware into an existing immersion cooling solution can be challenging.

Limited Availability

Immersion cooling technology is still relatively new, and there are a limited number of vendors that provide immersion cooling solutions. This can make it difficult for organizations to find the right solution for their needs.

Maintenance and Support

Immersion cooling solutions require specialized maintenance and support, which can be more complex than traditional air-cooled solutions.

How does Newtech's immersion cooling solution work?

At Newtech, we offer a cutting-edge immersion cooling solution that is designed to provide highly efficient and reliable cooling for data centers of all sizes. The process works as follows:

1. Submersion of IT Equipment

Servers are fully submerged in a non-conductive, dielectric fluid. Unlike traditional air cooling, this fluid directly contacts the hardware, preventing overheating without the risk of electrical damage.

2. Heat Absorption by the Fluid

The dielectric fluid absorbs the heat generated by the hardware during operation. As the fluid has a much higher thermal conductivity than air, enabling more effective heat absorption than traditional air methods.

3. Circulation of Cooling Fluid

The heated fluid is continuously circulated out of the immersion tank to ensure the removal of heat. The fluid flows to the next stage, where the heat is transferred for dissipation, ensuring uninterrupted cooling performance.

4. Heat Transfer via Heat Exchanger

The heat absorbed by the fluid is passed through a heat exchanger to a secondary cooling system. This secondary system can dissipate the heat into the environment or repurpose it for secondary applications.

5. Fluid Re-Circulation

Once cooled, the dielectric fluid is pumped back into the immersion tank, where it circulates again to absorb more heat from the servers. This closed-loop process ensures efficient, consistent cooling without the need for large, energy-intensive air conditioning units.

6. Monitoring and Optimization

Newtech integrates Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software to monitor real-time system performance, optimizing energy use and cooling efficiency.

By leveraging our expertise in digital infrastructure, Newtech’s immersion cooling solution contributes to sustainability. It reduces overall energy consumption and enables the use of renewable energy sources, making it a future-ready solution for digital infrastructure.

Benefits of using Newtech immersion cooling

As well as scalability, immersion cooling systems for data center also offer a quieter working environment. Other key benefits include:

Improved reliability and performance

Up to 10x increase in computing density when comparing to air-cooled data centers. It is also more reliable, as the server is now sealed in a unit and unaffected by vibration, humidity, or airborne dust particles.

Improved energy efficiency

Liquid has higher thermal transfer properties than air. It also reduces server energy use significantly as no fans are required within the rack – no water consumption and no fan energy used result in a 45% lower carbon footprint than that of air-cooled data centers, and a PUE of 1.09 or lower anywhere.

Sustainability

Liquid cooling provides a more effective way to repurpose captured heat, as liquid-to-liquid heat transfer is more efficient than what is possible with air-based cooling systems. As a result, a large portion of energy is ready for reuse, creating the possibility of energy neutrality by supplying heat.

Maximizing cost efficiency

It maximizes data center space by reducing its physical footprint by 40%. It also decreases cooling infrastructure CAPEX and OPEX by around 50% and 85% respectively.

Frequently Asked Question

1. What is liquid cooling, and how does it work?

Liquid cooling is a cooling solution that involves using a liquid with high thermal transfer properties to absorb and dissipate heat generated by computer systems. There are several types of liquid cooling, each with its own pros and cons, depending on the physical environment, scale, and application.

2. What is the difference between single-phase and two-phase immersion cooling?

Single-phase immersion cooling is a simpler and safer solution that uses a single liquid to absorb and dissipate heat. It has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and lower complexity than two-phase immersion cooling, which uses a more complex system that involves boiling the liquid to absorb heat. Two-phase immersion cooling is more expensive and less environmentally friendly than single-phase immersion cooling.

3. What is the current challenge for immersion cooling adoption?

The current challenge for immersion cooling adoption is the need for customized solutions, infrastructure design changes, and associated complexities that come with implementing this new technology.

4. What is the difference between immersion cooling & liquid cooling?

Immersion cooling involves submerging entire servers in a non-conductive fluid, which directly absorbs the heat from the hardware. The fluid comes into direct contact with all components, providing efficient heat transfer.

Liquid cooling, typically refers to direct-to-chip cooling, uses a cooling liquid that circulates through tubes attached directly to key components to remove heat. Both methods use liquid to cool, but the approach and contact with hardware differ.

5. Is immersion cooling worth to invest for my company?

Yes, immersion cooling can be a valuable investment, especially if your company operates high-density data centers or is looking to reduce energy consumption and operational costs. Immersion cooling systems are highly efficient, reducing the need for traditional air conditioning and minimizing energy waste. While the initial setup costs may be higher, the long-term savings in energy expenses and reduced hardware failure rates make it a worthwhile investment.