Immersion Cooling

What is immersion Cooling?

Immersion cooling is where IT components or full servers are immersed in a thermally, but not electrically conductive liquid.

Because the equipment is cooled using a liquid IT hardware or servers do not require fans and the heat exchanged between the coolant and the secondary cooling loop (normally water based) occurs through a heat exchanger.

There are two basic approaches:

  1. IT components / servers are installed into a shared “tank”
  2. Individual servers are installed in specially designed rack mountable “nodes”

There are also two key different types of immersion cooling:

  1. Single Phase
    • Single phase coolants remain in the same liquid state
    • Coolant is pumped into a heat exchange where the heat is transferred to a cooler water circuit
  2. Two Phase
    • Two phase coolants can exist in either a liquid or gas state
    • Coolant heats up and turns into a gas
    • A condenser is used to transfer the heat to a cooler water circuit, returning the gas to a liquid state

Why Use Immersion Cooling?

  • More energy efficient. Liquids can absorb and transfer heat far more efficiently than air
  • Reduced PUE, as low as 1.03
  • Increased density, more compute in a smaller area, especially for applications such as HPC, AI and ML.
  • Easier to reuse the thermal energy extracted from the running IT systems