Abstract

With a rising need for high-performance computing in data centers, enhanced heat dissipation from microprocessors becomes critical for maintaining their surface temperature in a compact setting. While air cooling has been sufficient until now, liquid cooling proves to be superior in its heat dissipation capabilities. The present work investigates enhancing liquid cooling with boiling and enhanced boiling structures in a novel subcooled boiling chamber. The single-phase forced convection heat transfer is first studied by enhancing the heat transfer performance (CHF and HTC) by more than 50 % with the injection of air bubbles at the heater surface. A self-sustaining method that uses a venturi injector to inject air bubbles in liquid cooling is subsequently developed. Experimental, numerical and theoretical investigations are further undertaken to study the impact of working fluid and enhancement structures on pool boiling heat transfer. The tests show enhancing maximum heat flux dissipation above 215 W/cm2 while enhancing HTC by more than 85 %. Moreover, an enhancement evaluation index and criteria are developed to find desirable enhancement structures for cooling electronics. Lastly, a novel boiling chamber is introduced that uses submerged condensation and subcooled boiling in a compact configuration suitable for high performance computing environments such as data centers. The effect of liquid height above a boiling surface is first investigated to show its impact on boiling and condensing performance. The results show that the boiling chamber is able to dissipate more than 1.1 kW of heat from a simulated CPU with the same dimensions as in a compact server used in data centers. The device can dissipate more than 880 W of heat while keeping the surface temperature below 92 °C and the thermal resistance lower than 0.1 °C/W without encountering the critical heat flux (CHF) condition.

Publication Date

5-20-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Engineering (Ph.D.)

Department, Program, or Center

Engineering

College

Kate Gleason College of Engineering

Advisor

Satish G. Kandlikar

Advisor/Committee Member

Amlan Ganguly

Advisor/Committee Member

Isaac Bernabe Perez-Raya

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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