Thermal management of high density power servers using a compact two-phase loop cooling system

With the increased usage of the internet and advances in computing hardware, the personal computing industry has shifted to lightweight mobile laptop platforms and the mobile internet devices. These personal computing devices are dependent on the cloud computing infrastructures that offer services delivered through data centers consisting of servers including multi-core semiconductor processors. Thermal management of most servers relies on a heat sink combined with fans providing forced air convection to reject heat to the ambient. However this conventional technique cannot accommodate the increased heat fluxes in the confined server enclosure and imposes a significant increase in noise, vibration, and power consumption. Innovative thermal management solutions must be employed to compensate for the increased heat dissipation in the space-constrained enclosures of high density power servers. In this paper, a compact two-phase loop cooling system was investigated to apply high density rack-mount server cooling applications. Experimental characterization shows that the system can reach a maximum heat flux of 22.22W/cm² with thermal resistance of 0.136°C/W.