Multi‐criteria thermoeconomic and thermodynamic assessments of the desalination‐integrated two‐phase liquid‐immersion data center cooling system

Abstract

The waste heat management of the data center cooling systems has a significant share in the energy-efficient operations of the data centers. In this study, a new hybrid desalination-data center cooling system is proposed to reduce the cost drawback of the waste heat in the data center cooling operations. A two-phase liquid-immersion cooling unit is selected as the data center cooling method with the cooling load range of 0.7 to 1.5 kW. It is a promising solution thanks to the high heat flux removal performance but there is still a lack of research about waste heat management. The waste heat of the immersion cooling system is used to heat up the feed side of the desalination module. A direct contact membrane distillation system as preferred as the desalination module with the membrane area range of 5 to 75 cm 2. The proposed hybrid system is investigated according to the thermodynamic, economic, and thermoeconomic aspects. The thermoeconomic assessment is done concerning the unique exergy-cost matrix of the original design. The maximum thermal and exergy efficiencies are found as 64.5% and 53.7%, respectively. The daily distilled water rate can reach 6.13 kg at the highest cooling load and membrane area. Compared to the stand-alone data center cooling operation, the hybrid system has higher capital and operation costs. The payback period is found 3.72 years that means the proposed system is economically feasible for real applications. Also, the levelized product cost of the hybrid design is calculated in the range of 2.69 to 5.33 SGD/h. In the multiobjective optimization study, the best trade-off point is decided at the cooling load of 1.1 kW whilst the membrane area varies between 5.12 and 5.19 cm 2 .

The Applications and Challenges of Nanofluids as Coolants in Data Centers: A Review

“…[1]. Compared to the past, the rapid development of the current information technology industry has placed greater demands on the uninterrupted operation of key equipment in data centers [2]. It is predicted that data centers account for almost 2% of total global power consumption [3].…”

“…The electricity consumption condition in data centers can be seen in Figure 1. In the operation of traditional data centers, the main way to remove heat from highpower servers is air cooling [2]. However, the existing data center cooling technology is still based on air cooling [9].…”

Numerical Modelling and Performance Evaluation of Vacuum Membrane Distillation for Energy-Efficient Seawater Desalination: Towards Energy-Efficient Solutions

“…This is essential to guarantee the effective and dependable implementation of MD technology. The main objective of MD modeling lies in the anticipation of the permeate flux and the understanding of its relationship with various factors such as the configuration of the MD module, properties of the membrane, and operational variables [24][25][26]. While numerous mathematical models have been documented in the literature for MD, the predominant attention has been on the modeling of DCMD due to its relative simplicity, whereas other configurations of MD have been comparatively less explored [27,28].…”

Experimental Investigations on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Direct Contact Liquid Cooling for CPU

“…Cheng et al [31] have simulated and studied the effect of 3M novec HFE 7100 liquid on the heat dissipation of an Intel CPU i9-9900 K. Zhou et al [32] have studied the effect of a two-phase liquid cooling uniform heating plate (HFE 7100 liquid) on CPU heat dissipation. Applications of two-phase immersion cooling have been performed at micro-scale level [33], or within a very small server power rate range through experiments [34] and combined energy solution systems [35,36]; however, there has been no system-scale academic study assessing thermal management with respect to environmental and economic aspects in detail, to the best of our knowledge [37][38][39][40].…”