Development of Immersion Cooling Systems

19th and 20th century immersion milestones:

• Electrical systems immersed in dielectric fluids for heat management (especially transformers) were used before 1887.
• The first patent to explicitly mention the use of oil as a coolant and insulator is included in the patent for a Constant Current Transformer submitted in 1899 by Richard Fleming of Lynn, Massachusetts, assignor to the New York General Electric Company.

• "The first reference to the specific use of dielectric fluids for cooling “computers” was made in 1966 by Oktay Sevgin of IBM.
• In 1968, Richard C. Chu and John H. Seely, working for IBM, patented the “Immersion cooling system for modularly packaged components.”.
• Seymour R. Cray Jr., founder of Cray Research, LLC, patented the “Immersion-cooled high density electronic assembly” in 1982.
• The Cray T90 (launched in 1995) used large liquid-to-cooled liquid heat exchangers and single- or two-phase immersion cooling liquids for heat removal.
• Thanks to the advent of CMOS, significant energy savings have been achieved in CPUs that quickly reduce the cooling challenges of HPC systems.

21st century immersion milestones:

• In 2006, Hardcore Computer Inc. was established for offering closed-case style PCs for gaming.
• In 2009, Green Revolution Cooling relaunched the concept of open bath immersion cooling, bringing a commercial open bath immersion system to the HPC industry..
• In 2011, Buzotop launched the first commercial rackmount closed case-based technology specifically designed for data center distributions.
• In 2016, Asperitas created the first pumpless, high density, single-phase open bath immersion system with natural convection circulation.
• Starting from 2016, the rise of the cryptocurrency has become a major and key driver behind the immersion process. This is because of the high TCO benefits that are quite valuable in crypto mining. This period allowed many immersion technologies to gain basic experience and mature their technology.
• 2017 saw a large number of start-ups in the field of immersion cooling. It is mostly related to the increasing power and cooling challenges in the cryptocurrency and data center industry.
• In 2019, the first documented industry standards for immersion were presented at the OCP summit in San Jose.