CEEE Awarded DOE Data Center Cooling Project

The Center for Environmental Energy Engineering has been awarded $1.1 Million through The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), (COOLERCHIPS) program. The DOE announced $40 million in funding for 15 projects that will develop high-performance, energy-efficient cooling solutions for data centers. The awarded projects will work on lowering the operational carbon footprint associated with powering and cooling data centers. CEEE’s Small and Smart Thermal Systems Laboratory (S2TS) is a sub-recipient to Flexnode (A Bethesda, MD-based company) on developing an ultra-compact and high-efficiency, prefabricated, modularly designed data center.

To enable the future needs of efficient computing for cutting edge data centers, Flexnode, and its partners will develop a prefabricated modular micro data center with unprecedented energy efficiency and power density. The proposed system leverages four key component and system-level technology advancements, including (a) a novel, experimentally proven, microchannel cooling technology that yields much higher heat removal rates at comparable pressure drops when compared to the state-of-the-art technologies; (b) a chassis-based novel hybrid immersion cooling approach; (c) a low-cost, high-performance additive manufacturing-enabled dry cooling technology; and (d) a shaped optimized container housing the entire system. These advancements will facilitate meeting or exceeding the required performance, power density, cost, and sustainability metrics. The Principal investigator for the project is Dr. Michael Ohadi and Co-PI is Dr. Ratnesh Tiwari. Professor Peter Sandborn from the mechanical engineering department and Dr. Andres Sarmiento and Prof. Amir Schooshtari, both from the S2TS laboratory, will also contribute to this project.

Published September 29, 2023