Impact Cooling LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: N/A

Description

Data center efficiency gains have effectively stalled over the past decade. Meanwhile, data centers are on track to consume 8% of global electricity by the year 2030 and approximately one-third of that energy is wasted on cooling server equipment rather than being used for actual computations. Despite the growing availability of liquid cooling solutions, due to their limited adoption, the primary mover for data center efficiency has come from better segregation of the hot and cold air. The industry is now desperate for new and innovative cooling solutions that can dramatically reduce data center energy consumption while being more readily adoptable by the market. We propose a novel data center cooling solution which can achieve the necessary efficiency improvements using only air. Our patented jet impingement cooling technology can achieve dramatically improved heat transfer with air at minimal cost of flow work to drive the air. When applied towards microchip cooling in data centers, by leveraging elevated working pressures rather than being limited to ambient conditions, we propose a solution which can achieve a cooling COP exceeding 20, even in hot and humid environments. The proposed effort will design, fabricate, and test key components of that system to prove the applicability of our technology and to inform system-level design and optimization.