Session: 02-02 Immersion Cooling II

Paper Number: 100309

100309 - Thermal Test Vehicle (Ttv) Performance of 2-Phase Immersion Boiler Assemblies 

The requirements for thermal management in high-performance computers are rapidly outpacing the capabilities of the best commercial heat sinks, including those with integrated heat pipes. The problem lies in three compounding trends: a) higher total chip power, b) higher local heat flux in chip hotspots, and c) smaller system enclosures. Pumped liquid cooling is a promising alternative, but this approach requires innovation and careful design to cool a high heat flux chip within a targeted system volume. Two-Phase immersion cooling is making a resurgence for use in server applications driven by an increase in chip densities and the need for a reduction in overall data center power usage. This experiment used the TTV packages and test boards from Intel and AMD respectively. This arrangement helps thermal solution providers develop high-quality thermal solutions, using the same test hardware that OEMs use to evaluate the solutions. Intel and AMD TTVs emulate the Intel Skylake series of 8^th Gen Xeon CPUs and AMD EPYC processors line of CPUs respectively. This paper focuses on pool boiling characteristics from an array of heaters in the TTV package which simulate electronic chips on a vertically-oriented printed circuit board. A pool boiling study was conducted using Fluorinert 3284, BP 50°C fluid. In an effort to increase thermal performance, tests were conducted on TTV Packages augmented with two different enhanced boilers featuring Aavid regular boiling enhancement coating (BEC) using relatively large Copper particles sintered to a flat Cu surface and New Aavid BEC using the 3M™ Microporous Metallic Boiling Enhancement Coating (MMBEC), a powder composed of modified copper particles which are applied to a copper substrate and fused at elevated temperature. Enhanced boilers using the 3M™ BEC performed better than the regular boilers and the thermal resistance case to fluid was found to be around 0.020 °C/W at 400 W power using Fluorinert 3284.

Presenting Author: Jimil M. Shah TMGcore Inc