Computer cooling

Summary

Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer components, to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, and hard disk drives. Components are often designed to generate as little heat as possible, and computers and operating systems may be designed to reduce power consumption and consequent heating according to workload, but more heat may still be produced than can be removed without attention to cooling. Use of heatsinks cooled by airflow reduces the temperature rise produced by a given amount of heat. Attention to patterns of airflow can prevent the development of hotspots. Computer fans are widely used along with heatsink fans to reduce temperature by actively exhausting hot air. There are also more exotic cooling techniques, such as liquid cool

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling

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Conceptual Design of a 24 kV, 1 kA Resistive Superconducting Fault Current Limiter

Bertrand Dutoit, Mathias Noe

In recent years many large scale demonstrators and prototypes of superconducting fault current limiters have been successfully developed and tested. Within the European Project ECCOFLOW (www.eccoflow.org), it is the first time that a resistive-type superconducting fault current limiter is developed for two different locations and that a permanent installation is foreseen. The limiter has a rating of 20 kV and 1 kA and will be tested in a busbar and transformer feeder application. The paper summarizes the conceptual design of this innovative limiter and reports in detail about the development of the superconducting limiting elements, their integration into a cryostat and the design of the whole limiter including cooling and grid integration. As a main result it can be summarized that the ECCOFLOW limiter fulfills all requirements according to the two different specifications. Approximately 3 km of 12 mm wide YBCO tape will be used to realize a three phase system.

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2012

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Due to the increase in energy prices and spiralling consumption, there is a need to greatly reduce the cost of electricity within data centers, where it makes up 50% of the total cost of the IT infrastructure. A technological solution to this is using on-chip cooling with a single-phase or evaporating liquid to replace energy intensive air-cooling. The energy carried away by the liquid or vapour can also potentially be used in district heating, as an example. Thus, the important issue here is “what is the most energy efficient heat removal process?” As an answer, this paper presents a direct comparison of single-phase water, a 50% water ethylene glycol mixture and several two-phase refrigerants, including the new fourth generation refrigerants HFO1234yf and HFO1234ze. Two-phase cooling using HFC134a had an average junction temperature 9 to 15˚C lower than for single-phase cooling, while the required pumping power for the CPU cooling element for single-phase cooling was on the order of 20-130 times higher to achieve the same junction temperature uniformity. Hot-spot simulations also showed that two-phase refrigerant cooling was able to adjust to local hot-spots because of flow boiling's dependency on the local heat flux, with junction temperatures being 20 to 30˚C lower when compared to water and the 50% water-ethylene glycol mixture, respectively. An exergy analysis was developed considering a cooling cycle composed by a pump, a condenser and a multi-microchannel cooler. The focus was to show the exergetic efficiency of each component and of the entire cycle when the subject energy recovery is considered. Water and HFC134a were the working fluids evaluated in such analysis. The overall exergetic efficiency was higher when using HFC134a (about 2%) and the exergy destroyed, i.e. irreversibilities, showed that the cooling cycle proposed still have a huge potential to increase the thermodynamic performance.

2011

Dynamic modeling and simulation of a pipeline used for transportation of a fluid near the saturation

Zeli Zhang

A new district energy network has been developed by using CO2 as a heat transfer fluid. Only two pipes are required by the network, thus allowing the recovery of waste heat from the cooling users to be valorized by the heating users. Understanding and predicting the dynamics as well as identifying control methods and strategies is one of the key issues for the development of such a CO2 network that would operate in a safe, reliable and energy efficient manner. To assess the technical feasibility and address the safety problems, a physical-based model was developed to describe the fluid dynamics of CO2 pipelines used for transportation of a fluid near the saturation. Dynamic simulations were carried out to investigate pressure and flow fluctuation during transient flow and under changes of external perturbations. It shows that the system was able to response all these perturbations although the corresponding pressure wave propagates along the pipe.

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