Miniature vapor compression refrigeration systems for active cooling of high performance computers

A small refrigeration system for cooling of computer system components is evaluated. A thermodynamic model describing the performance of the cycle along with a computer simulation program is developed to evaluate its performance. The refrigeration system makes use of a miniature reciprocating vapor compression compressor. Due to space limitations in some high performance computer servers, a miniature refrigeration system composed of a compressor, capillary tube, a compact condenser, and a cold-plate evaporator heat exchanger are used. Mathematical multi-zone formulation for modeling thermal-hydraulic performance of heat exchanger for the condenser and evaporator are presented. The throttling device is a capillary tube and there is presented a mathematical formulation for predicting refrigerant mass flow rate through the throttling device. A physically based efficiency formulation for simulating the performance of the miniature compressor is used. An efficient iterative numerical scheme with allowance for utilization of various refrigerants is developed to solve the governing system of equations. Using the simulation program, the effects of parameters such as the choice of working refrigerant, evaporating and condensing temperatures on system components and overall efficiency of system are studied. In addition, a RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) discussion of the proposed CPU-cooling refrigeration solution is presented. The results of analysis show that the new technology not only overcomes many shortcomings of the traditional fan-cooled systems, but also has the capacity of increasing the cooling system´s coefficient of performance.