Keeping cool: A novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by IBM could make it efficient for data centers to provide waste heat for buildings.
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
A novel water-cooling system makes it more efficient for computers to heat buildings.
They have been used to model climate change, forecast economic trends, and simulate the intricate complexities folding proteins. Now IBM has something new in store for high-performance computers: heating buildings.
Thanks to a novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by the company, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office, says Bruno Michel, manager of advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The goal, he says, is to improve the energy efficiency of large computing clusters and reduce their environmental impact.
A pilot scheme involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year--the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. Despite its close proximity to the circuitry, there is no danger of leakage, says Michel, because the capillaries are hermetically sealed. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.
IBM has spent several years developing the microfluidic cooling technology, and it plans to test it in partnership with Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. A 10-teraflop computer cluster consisting of two IBM BladeCenter Servers in a single rack will be used by the university's Computational Science and Engineering Lab to model fluid dynamics for nanotechnology research. The water will then be plumbed into the university's heating system, where it will help heat 60 buildings. "This is the first large-scale system," says Michel. "It's about one-twentieth of the size of an average data center." Ultimately, he says, the technology could help address the energy problems posed by large data centers.
Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. There have been a few efforts to recycle the heat generated by conventional data centers. For example, a nine-story, 18,500-square-meter data center being built in London by the hosting company Telehouse Europe will provide heating for nearby offices. Other companies, including IBM, have used excess thermal energy to heat green houses or swimming pools. But reusing waste heat is expensive because usually only relatively low temperatures can be harvested, says Frank Brand, director of operations of the Dutch data-center engineering firm Imtech. "You can only get about 30 to 35 degrees Celsius," he says.
Data centers, under greater demand than ever, are looking to low-power chips as a way to save money—but switching won't be easy.
By using an electric charge to put molecules in motion, a new device can make a computer's fans more efficient.
Computer fans could get some relief from charged particles that create a cooling breeze.
is that computers cooled without using air don't have to continually suck air in, with whatever is in that air: I've found inches of dust bunnies in servers. One server shipped to us from another company we bought would not come on, I disassembled and cleaned dust out. Reassembled it and presto, instant on! Same thing with an old HP industrial control frame.
With this method, you just need to dust off fins of a heat exchanger if it has one, if not piped off to a building system. And the PC can be sealed against coffee spills, machine shop shavings, rodents, cockroaches, dust bunnies, etc.
The "novel network" is the constructal design that has been taught and practiced in the field of constructal theory since 1997. This flow architecture brings the coolant uniformly close (with "optimal distribution of imperfection") to every tiny component that generates heat inside a large finite volume. The constructal philosophy exploited by IBM should have been acknowledged.
The constructal flow architecture consists of two water flows shaped as trees matched canopy to canopy. First, the cold stream invades and bathes the large volume (like a delta), and then it flows out, from volume to point (as a river basin). It is described in full detail in chapter 8 of Adrian Bejan's constructal theory book Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 181-212). The constructal tree-tree architecture has been demonstrated and tested in numerous subsequent articles: see for example http://www.constructal.org, and Prof. Bejan's web site at Duke, http://www.mems.duke.edu/fds/pratt/MEMS/faculty/abejan
Technology Review should be the first to do a feature story on the constructal law of design in nature, and the technological advances based on it. Professor Bejan is a graduate of MIT (BS, MS, PhD).
Btw, the Advanced Thermal Packaging research group at IBM's Zürich lab confirmed 2 years ago that they use constructal theory in their researches,
see http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/constructal_the_1.php
It is one among the many possible applications of Constructal theory.
Re: Constructaly inspired design
I think there's chicken and egg problem.
Long before the theory, various practice existed.
For example, heat in car uses air heated by engine. Cloth traps heat generated by body etc.
And of course I am sure that I am not the only one that thought that heat from computers were beneficial during cold days... back even in 80s.
Sky is the limit now for heat exchange
Wow!, I am impressed. This concept will have tremendous applications in capturing heat from almost any process. Just imagine the tremendous gain we could have in decreased energy consumption all over the world.It is all about capturing energy from Man & Machine.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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33 Comments
A pleasing shift towards efficiency
Here's a video of this in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioCZojN4A0g
I believe I first saw that video here on Technology Review. It's nice to see that technology being put to use in a relatively short amount of time since I first read about it.
This is really such a simple concept, and yet so tricky to pull off. Also, this represents yet another example of how major companies are really embracing the concept of sustainability. It's a nice thing to see. Efficiency makes me happy.
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