Prof. Dr. Fei DUAN

Two-Phase Immersion Cooling Enhancement and Application for Data Centers

School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue

E-mail: feiduan@ntu.edu.sg

Singapore:  639798

Bio

Dr. Fei DUAN is a tenured faculty in School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Dr. Duan obtained his Ph.D. degree in University of Toronto, Canada in 2005. Dr. Duan also worked as a visiting scientist in Institute of Fluid Mechanics at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. The topics of his research cover droplet wetting and evaporation dynamics, Marangoni flow energy transport, particle self-assembly, enhanced thermal management, efficient cogeneration system, etc. In NTU, Dr. Duan has secured over 16 million Singapore dollars on research funding from the governmental agencies and industries as a principal investigator. He has advised over 28 postdoctoral fellows or research associates, 20 Ph.D. students, and 14 Master’s students. Dr. Duan has published over 180 peer-reviewed journal papers, 4 patents, 5 book chapters, and 130 conference presentations including 20 plenary lectures and keynotes. He serves as Subject Editor for Applied Thermal Engineering (Elsevier, Impact Factor: 6.1), at Editorial Board for Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio, Impact Factor: 3.8) and Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer (Tech Science Press); and Editor at Large in Droplet (Willy). 

Title

Two-Phase Immersion Cooling Enhancement and Application for Data Centers

Abstract

The high-power cooling requirement for model data center facilities is keeping increasing with the fast development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, communication technologies, internet of things, digital twin supported manufacturing, etc. The higher performance of the data centers nowadays leads to high-density and high flux heat generation. The lower power usage effectiveness (PUE) in the data centers is attracting more investigate. To overcome the low heat transfer barrier in most present commercialized data centers on the basis of convective air cooling, the direct liquid immersion cooling for the electric heat is reported in this talk. It covers the effect surface roughness, patterns and jet impingement enhancement. The talk also covers our system development of direct liquid immersion cooling data center systems, we further conduct the thermal analysis in the two-phase immersion cooling data center systems and make a comparison  with single-phase immersion cooling and air-cooling systems. It is found that the two-phase cooling systems can reduce the PUE below 1.1. The advance of direct liquid immersion cooling systems beyond the air-cooling data center system is discussed on the economic factors.