New Thermal Material Could Slash Data Center Cooling Demands
Meeting the world's data storage demands is costly, in terms of money, energy, and environmental impact – but a new material could significantly improve the cooling of our data centers while also making our home and business electronics more energy efficient.
Currently, bulky and energy-intensive cooling solutions are typically deployed to chill out the hardware holding our data, adding up to about 40 percent of overall data center energy use (around 8 terawatt-hours every year).
The team from the University of Texas at Austin and Sichuan University in China estimates around 13 percent of those 8 terawatt-hours could be shaved off by their new organic thermal interface material (TIM).
The TIM substantially boosts the rate at which heat can be taken away from active electronic components and channeled into a heatsink for air or water to carry away.
That in turn means a lower demand on active cooling technologies, including fans and liquid cooling.
"The power consumption of cooling infrastructure for energy-intensive data centers and other large electronic systems is skyrocketing," says materials scientist Guihua Yu, from the University of Texas at Austin.
"That trend isn't dissipating anytime soon, so it's critical to develop new ways, like the material we've created, for efficient and sustainable cooling of devices operating at kilowatt levels and even higher power."
The TIM developed here is a colloidal mixture of the liquid metal galinstan and particles of aluminum nitride, combined in a way that creates a gradient interface – one that helps heat pass through without any hard boundaries between the two substances.