INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Immersion cooling is the most promising cooling system to reduce power usage and improve energy efficiency. Since immersion cooling was first discovered in the 19th century for use in transformers, it has been rapidly developed for a variety of applications with state-of-the-art technology. Initially, the immersion cooling method with mineral oil focuses only on controlling the temperature of electronic components to prevent overheating

In the last decade, technological advances have led to mass production of electronic devices, increased energy consumption in the production process. A nanotechnology approach is also presented, which reduces the size and cost of devices, but has significant thermal management problems due to its high power density, resulting in increased heat output. Meanwhile, increased heat generation in the device typically results in decreased productivity and eventually device failure.

It is known that an increase in the temperature above 75°C has the potential to increase the rate of failure rate exponentially. As a result of the desire to reduce the size of electronic devices and increase their productivity, cooling systems have become critical. Since traditional methods fail to meet the continuing demand for these devices, a large number of solutions has been developed over the last decades, many of which are summarized below.

Cooling of concentrated photovoltaic cells is very important as in other electronic devices. This is due to the need to properly manage the heat generated from the cell in order to maintain the efficiency of the battery. Therefore, a reliable heat dissipation system is needed to ensure the efficient performance of photovoltaic cells. One of the solutions offered by some experts is to place the empty cells directly into the liquid. This led early studies to focus on the expected electrical and optical effects of fluids on cells. Over time, research studies have advanced with new explanations for PV cell cooling, such as the possibility of using shallow layers of liquid surrounding cells to capture light. It is also important to note that immersion of the cell liquid is not limited to surface wetting and optical advantages, but it also allows direct immersion of a concentrated photovoltaic cell into a liquid. Moreover, the absence of a contact wall between the cell and the liquid indicates effective cooling possibilities for the cell.

It has also been reported that the cooling of photovoltaic cells is important because of the energy efficiency dilemma. However, it is important to note that they can be cooled using both water and air immersion. Besides, direct immersion is preferred for the cooling process of concentrated photovoltaic cells compared to other mechanisms. It is also possible to increase the efficiency of the photovoltaic module by using water cooling system.

When the temperature rises, the computing speed of data center computers and servers slows down, resulting in higher energy consumption under the same workload. A traditionally cooled data center consumes the most energy, reaching 38%. However, immersion cooling was tested on a 2 kW power converter operating at 97.2% efficiency in deionized water. An uncontrolled increase in temperature can also damage these components, but immersion cooling technology has been observed to improve energy efficiency. The use of VCO dielectric liquid or mineral oil is proven to be a data center energy saver and does not damage its components.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system and cryptographic currency introduced as open source software in 2009. It provides users with the ability to add a free client or wallet to the computer to send and receive payments using a Bitcoin address. Participants are known as miners and are tasked with the responsibility of verifying transactions in blocks using a secure hash algorithm (SHA) and a proof-of-work concept and publishing them to the public blockchain. There are fees associated with validating transactions with two attributes, such as capital, to verify the cost of hardware used and power consumption. It is important to note that more power consumption for ‘hashing’ often brings more profits to miners in the form of big rewards. Miners initially used traditional CPUs to perform SHA, but the GPU (graphics processing unit) was found to be more cost-effective and therefore resulted in excessive profits. Therefore, players have become aware that they have a “money making machine” as Bitcoin grows in popularity and they begin to compete to create the most efficient mining hardware. The rapidly growing power densities of mining clusters combined with their short lifecycles make traditional air-cooled data centers difficult to handle.

2-phase immersion is seen by many as a viable technology to meet the power density and energy efficiency needs of the high-performance computing market. For example, a power density 100 times higher than a typical air-cooled server has been cooled using a superior method with higher efficiency than direct water cooling. Also, 2-phase immersion cooling has been used in the IT industry, avoiding the risk, despite numerous demonstrations in many countries, but the new technical approach has simplified the application process.

Battery performance degrades when used at temperatures higher than 45°C due to reduced porosity and pore connectivity at high temperatures, which then leads to a reduction in battery current uniformity. While Lindgren and Lund found that the charge capacity of a battery may decrease by an average of 15% when charged at 10°C, a very cold operating temperature can also cause a significant decrease in battery performance. This means it is important to ensure that the battery is kept at the optimum operating temperature of 20 °C, and Dubey, Pulugundla and Srouji found that immersion cooling is better for this purpose compared to Cold Plate Based Cooling. It is also observed that immersion cooling has the ability to cool the entire cell surface and improve temperature uniformity by reducing the local heating effect on the positive and negative electrodes compared to indirect cooling. It is a dielectric liquid immersion cooling technology for the thermal management of Li-ion batteries.