Graduation Semester and Year

2016

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Dereje Agonafer

Abstract

In today’s networking world, the usage of Servers and Data centers has been increasing significantly with a corresponding increase in power. The data center energy efficiency largely depends on thermal management of servers. Currently, air cooling is the most widely used thermal management technology in data centers. However, air cooling is starting to reach its limits due to high powered microprocessors and packaging. To overcome these limitations of air cooling in data centers, liquid cooling methods are starting to gain more traction. Thermal shadowing is the effect in which temperature of a cooling medium increases by carrying heat from one server and results in decreasing its heat carrying capacity due to a reduction in the temperature difference between the maximum junction temperature of successive heat sinks and incoming fluid. Thermal Shadowing is a challenge for both air and low velocity oil flow cooling and as such, both air and low velocity dielectric flow cooling technologies need to be optimized to get high energy efficiency. Low velocity oil flow cooling can be an effective technology for high thermal loads and high heat capacitance. Form factor study of 3rd generation server is another area of research in which impact of form factor on a maximum junction temperature and thermal resistance at the server level is documented. This work is to provide an insight to increase the rack density by reducing form factor of an existing server. This work can open up to more heat load per rack. The heat sink is a critical part for cooling effectiveness at server level. This work is to provide an efficient range of operation for heat sink with numerical and computational modelling of third generation open compute server. Optimization of heat sink can allow to cool high power density servers effectively. A parametric study is conducted and the thermal efficiency has been optimized.

Keywords

Data center cooling, Oil flow cooling, Thermal shadowing

Disciplines

Aerospace Engineering | Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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