By Josh Perry, Editor [email protected]
Forced Physics, a thermal management company that was boosted early on by funding from the U.S. Army Research Laboratories, was recently featured in an article by The Next Platform about its innovative JouleForce Conductor, a passive air-cooling solution for data centers that the company claims will provide 40 percent cost savings and 90 percent cooling power reduction.
Forced Physics has released a new passive cooling solution for data centers. (Forced Physics/YouTube)
According to the company website, the conductor requires an external fan or blower, such as the ones already in place in most data centers for ambient cooling, to pull air through it. The conductor is highly-effective at pulling the heat from electronics and releasing it into the air stream, eliminating the need for chillers, refrigerants or a closed loop liquid cooling solution.
Each chassis will hold one conductor and the heated electronics components are mounted on both sides to maximize cooling. The company designed the chassis and a standard chassis shelf to increase the ease of installation. The Forced Physics Big Rack will hold 144 chassis in approximately an eight-foot cube.
Because it has no moving parts and only requires filtered outside air, Forced Physics insists the conductor can be used in cloud, colocation, edge, and enterprise computing. The passive solution also requires little maintenance.
According to The Next Platform, “The fundamental challenge for air cooling servers is perspective. If you assume you can’t radically redesign a rack, you are stuck with trying to optimize the airflow you have been given. Forced Physics started by designing a modular, highly optimized air-based heat transfer system, then they designed a rack full of servers around it. It is a change of perspective on optimizing datacenter thermal design using air cooling.”
The article provided more details about the conductor, which is a 20-inch deep tube of milled aluminum. There are around 3,000 radiator blades arranged perpendicular running through the conductor.
“The new science in the JouleForce Conductor is in the arrangement and spacing of and micro-channel gaps between the blades,” the article explained. “The radiators are configured in a V-shaped array, with half (about 1,500) mounted on each side of the ‘V’. The Conductor’s intake splits the airflow into two streams of air flowing along the outside of the V-shaped blade array, which forces the air through micro-channels between the blades and out through the wide mouth of the ‘V’.”
Learn more about this new solution in the video below:
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