By Josh Perry, Editor
[email protected]

Liquid cooling has become a popular thermal management tool for a variety of applications, from home computing to servers and data centers, and in the last month three mainstays in the industry have revealed new liquid cooling designs that for data centers, and overclockers.

Lenovo and Facebook recently revealed new liquid cooling approaches for data center. (Wikimedia Commons)

Lenovo recently released Neptune, according to an article from ZDNet.com, which includes various techniques for liquid cooling in data centers. Among the approaches are rear door heat exchangers, direct-to-node liquid cooling and a hybrid cooling option that mixes air and liquid.

The article explained, “Lenovo is also making the argument that liquid cooling isn't expensive or difficult to implement. The company noted that in most cases, liquid cooling is less than 2 percent more expensive than air-cooled systems.”

Lenovo’s rear door heat exhangers are already being deployed in 30% of its high-performance computing (HPC) customers and is an add-on to systems already in place. The hybrid cooling option (Thermal Transfer Module/TTM) uses liquid in the heat sink to spread heat away from the device to an area where it is dissipated.  Direct-to-node cooling uses un-chilled water to remove the heat and the company insists is 90% effective.

ZDNet.com also highlighted a new system being put in place by Facebook that the company claims can handle less temperate environments. The StatePoint Liquid Cooling (SPLC) system was created by Nortek Air Solutions and is intended to cut water usage by more than 20% in hot and humid areas and 90% in cooler areas.

According to the article, the SPLC unit includes intake and exhaust dampers, filters, coils, fans and a membrane exchanger. A liquid-to-air energy exchanger is used that cools water as it evaporates through a membrane separation layer. The cold water is used to cool the air inside the data center and the membrane layer prevents contamination between water and air.

For overclockers, EVGA, according to an article from HotHardware.com, has demonstrated its ROBOCLOCKER, which uses liquid nitrogen in an automated, closed-loop process monitored by software to keep the CPU and GPU at the desired temperatures.

The article explained, “The benefits of such a setup are readily apparent. For starters, there's less LN2 waste, as the nitrogen gas is collected via a secondary tank. The control system, which includes a laptop that connects wirelessly to a custom controller, will automatically respond to cool the hardware down to the desired temperature. So, when temperatures naturally rise during an intense benchmark run, the system responds appropriately to maintain the desired temperature.”

Liquid cooling is not only the future, but it is also the present and companies continue to invest resources to design novel approaches for all applications.