Improvement of Cooling Efficiency for Data Centers using Heat Pipes

Data centers are one of key components in success
of many IT companies such as Google. Cooling of
data centers has been a decade-long problem since
tremendous heat emitted from multiple racks of computing
facilities typically overwhelms the cooling
magnitude by traditional air-based cooling schemes.
The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness
of heat pipe-based cooling technologies for
data center thermal management. For the feasibility,
three different cooling systems are tested: conventional
air cooling system, air-cooled heat pipe system,
and water-cooled heat pipe system. The mock-up
systems were already fabricated and tests are currently
ongoing. Temperature measurements will be
used to estimate the overall cooling performance of
each system. Experimental results will also be validated
with FEM-based 3D simulations. The outcomes of
the project and the perspective of advanced cooling
methodologies will be discussed.