Impact of surface enhancements upon boiling heat transfer in a liquid immersion cooled high performance small form factor server model

Abstract

The impact of increasing power consumption trends on a global economy with limited resources to sustain them cannot be understated. As worldwide communication requirements expand, data centers will need to be designed more efficiently to not only keep operation costs down for a business' bottom line, but also to be mindful of the world's power availability and resource supply. Therefore, the importance of designing data centers efficiently, but also compactly grows in step with society's power demands. To integrate into this new smarter data center, work has been completed on a small form factor, modular, high performance liquid immersion cooled server model with heat dissipations of over 700 Watts. These high power dissipations were achieved by the integration of enhanced surfaces affixed to the bare silicon die to promote increased boiling performance. The two surfaces tested were a sintered copper microporous heat sink and one that contained a dense array of microscale fins.