Oil cooling: Deep fried, or deep energy savings? - ExtremeTech

Since the early days of "alternative" cooling people have explored better ways to cool their computers.  Watercooling is by far the most popular of these and I have seen several modders building fully submerged PCs but these projects never got the attention of enterprise computing for various reasons.

By fully submerging the hardware, oil is better able to affect the transfer of heat from the components and out of the facility. Much like the home-built "aquarium PCs," oil-cooled servers also have a pump to circulate the oil and a radiator to cool it down before it's returned to the system. In that respect it is similar to watercooling - just without using water-blocks. Like water, oil has a higher specific heat capacity than air, meaning it can absorb more heat for a given volume of coolant.

Oil cooling does have its challenges, the biggest is how do you handle contaminates in the oil? Say one of the servers has a hardware failure causing a chip to burn.  Assuming the oil burn how do you handle conductive particles into the oil?  Given this doomsday scenario you could lose an entire rack of servers in rather quick order.

Maybe the cost savings are worth the risk.

Related Web URL: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/124197-cooling-...