Iceotope teams for heat recovery from immersive cooling

Business news | January 6, 2022

By Nick Flaherty

Thermal management specialist Iceotope in the UK is working with Lenovo and Dalrada’s Likido subsidiary in the US on cooling of data centre and cryptocurrency mining servers where the waste heat can be re-used.

The Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope collaboration provides fully-encapsulated liquid-cooled rack-mounted servers for data centres with heat recovery for district heating and other heating applications.

A typical university data centre uses approximately 600-750kW/hour of cooling, with the heat energy lost to the atmosphere. Edge of network data handling for artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, and data visualization further increases servers’ energy consumption and cooling demand. For example, the healthcare sector’s need to process and store information produced from imaging, telemedicine, and electronic health records is an enormous challenge.

For AI and Edge computing applications, the combined technology cools the highest power GPUs, and extreme rack densities, in the smallest space possible, without the need for large and costly purpose-built buildings with cold and hot aisles.

The Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope 360º solution is an integrated, immersion-cooled microdata centre with clean energy-driven cooling and heat recycling for maximized clean-energy efficiencies. This uses servers from Lenovo with liquid cooling systems from Iceotope. The new partnership authorizes Dalrada to market and sell the combined system in the US and Puerto Rico.

Datacentre operators can also cut their energy costs by selling the excess heat to the local district’s heat network. The heat energy can also be used to power LikidoAD absorption chillers, improving the power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio.

Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope systems are adaptable to existing Lenovo air-cooled servers by using the Iceotope Ku:l liquid-cooled system. Precision delivery of dielectric coolant maximizes the cooling directly to the hotspots meaning no front-to-back air cooling, no bottom-to-top immersion constraints, and no physical space wasted.

The other significant advantage is each liquid-cooled chassis is 100 percent sealed to isolate and protect the IT from the surrounding atmosphere. The sealed chassis creates a controlled environment impervious to dust, gases, and humidity.

Likido heat pumps use carbon dioxide as the refrigerant fluid, also in a closed system. The cooling for the server racks is via a secondary heat transfer fluid, usually water or glycol. Recovered heat from servers is transported directly into the heating system, usually by water.

This combination means that data centres can be located anywhere – even in the harshest IT environments for mining or offshore locations in dusty or desert environments that often operate without considering ambient air temperatures or renewable energy sources such as solar PV.

The Global Data Centre Liquid Cooling Market was valued at US$1.982bn in 2020 and is expected to reach $7.6bn by 2026, a CAGR of 25.2 percent.

Fully encapsulated liquid-cooled server racks run in near silence and do not need water or large volumes of air passing over them, which in turn causes noise and environmental concerns. This reduces the capital cost of specialized data center buildings and alleviates the need for hot and cold aisles in facilities.

“We are very excited to collaborate with leading companies like Lenovo and Iceotope. This partnership allows Dalrada to provide a liquid-cooled solution that combines the benefits of Likido ONE’s robust system cost-savings, increased performance, and output. A bonus is that the heat recovery and modular design is customizable, as a solution for a multitude of applications,” said Brian Bonar, Chairman & CEO of Dalrada.

www.iceotope.com; www.likido.net; www.dalrada.com; www.lenovo.com

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