What is immersion liquid cooling? What are the classifications?
2024-05-20 15:22:55

Immersion liquid cooling refers to immersing heating electronic components (such as CPUs, GPUs, memory, and hard drives) in refrigerant (coolant), relying on liquid flow circulation to remove heat. This technology has higher heat dissipation efficiency and lower noise compared to traditional cooling methods such as air cooling and water cooling.
According to whether the coolant undergoes phase change during the circulating heat dissipation process, it can be divided into single-phase immersion liquid cooling and two-phase immersion liquid cooling.
Single phase immersion liquid cooling: The liquid transfers heat through a liquid-liquid heat exchanger. Using cooling liquids with high boiling points, such as hydrocarbons (including mineral oil, vegetable oil, etc.) and silicon-based oil, this type of liquid only undergoes temperature changes during circulation, without phase transition, and transfers heat through the sensible heat change of the substance. The coolant medium has a higher heat transfer coefficient compared to air, so natural cooling sources can be more fully utilized for cooling. According to the circulation mode of the coolant, single-phase immersion liquid cooling can be divided into two types: pump driven and natural convection, but pump driven is the main type.
Two phase immersion liquid cooling: In the presence of heat, the liquid is transformed into a gaseous state, and then the gaseous coolant is converted back into a liquid state through a condenser. The cooling liquid of two-phase immersion cooling is mainly fluorinated liquid. The principle of two-phase immersion cooling is basically the same as that of single-phase immersion cooling, but there is a key difference: two-phase immersion cooling liquid must be able to change from liquid to gas when heated. This feature enables two-phase immersion liquid cooling technology to more effectively utilize latent heat of phase change for heat dissipation, thereby improving heat dissipation efficiency.
Immersion liquid cooling technology has a wide range of applications, not only suitable for consumer electronics fields such as PCs, mobile phones, projectors, but also for commercial fields such as data centers and 5G base stations, as well as other fields such as LiDAR and aerospace.
For a long time in the future, cold plate liquid cooling will still be the main method. Compared with two-phase immersion liquid cooling, single-phase liquid cooling has relatively lower costs, risks, and operational difficulties, and its application is relatively mature. Although immersion liquid cooling has some technological advantages, it has not yet been widely promoted due to limitations in coolant, low maturity of solutions, difficult operation and maintenance, high costs, and compatibility with IT equipment.

 

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