Liquid Cooling Technologies for

Data Centers and Edge Applications

White Paper 265

Revision 0

by Tony Day
Paul Lin
Robert Bunger

Executive summary
Increasing IT chip densities, a focus on energy
efficiency, and new IT use cases like harsh
edge computing environments are driving the
interest and adoption of liquid cooling. In this
paper we present the fundamentals of liquid
cooling, describe the advantages over conven-
tional air cooling, and explain the 5 main direct
to chip and immersive methods. To help guide
the selection of the appropriate liquid cooling
method for a given need, we explain the key
attributes that must be considered.

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Introduction IT equipment technology change has always been a primary driver in the develop-
ment of infrastructure cooling solutions. Although liquid cooling has been deployed
for many years in mainframes and high-performance computing (HPC), today’s de-
mands of cloud, IoT, AI, and edge applications are once again resulting in IT tech-
nology changes which is forcing a renewed look at liquid cooling and the develop-
ment of new technologies. Increasing focus on data center energy efficiency and
sustainability is also placing increased pressure on the data center industry to de-
velop and adopt efficient cooling infrastructure like liquid cooling. White Paper 279,
Five Reasons to Adopt Liquid Cooling, describes the reasons to consider this tech-
nology.

Data center owners and designers often have fundamental questions about liquid
cooling, such as:

• Why is liquid cooling better than air cooling in transferring heat energy?
• What are the types of liquid cooling solutions?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of each method of liquid cooling?
• What kind of critieria should I use to choose between different liquid cooling
technologies?

In this paper, we answer these questions, and provide guidance in selecting an ap-
propriate liquid cooling method for your application.

Air cooling vs. liquid cooling

The predominate way to remove heat from IT equipment is by airflow through the
chassis of the equipment. For typical servers, 70-80% of the heat is generated by
the CPU, with the remaining heat from peripherals like memory, power supply, hard
drives, SSD, etc. The increasing use of GPUs has further increased the heat gener-
ated within the IT chassis. A GPU can generate over 400 watts, but high core count
CPUs, like the latest Intel Xeon processor are now also at 400 watts.

Liquids have a much greater capacity to capture heat by unit volume. This allows
liquid cooling technologies to remove heat more efficiently and allows the chips to
work harder (i.e. increased clock speed). Additionally, the heat is rejected to the at-
mosphere either via dry coolers or, in the case of hotter environments, cooling tow-
ers. Sometimes the heat may be reused elsewhere such as district heating.

In the Appendix, we provide a detailed comparison between the heat transfer capa-
bilities of water and air.

Liquid cooling Liquid cooling is not new to data center applications. You can trace it back to the
1960s when it was used in IBM mainframes to solve the cooling challenges for solid
methods state devices which were densely packed and had lower allowable operating
temperatures. But, the introduction of complementary metal oxide semiconductor
(CMOS) technology in the early 1990s replaced bipolar semiconductor technology,
which reduced power consumption. As a result, convective airflow cooling again
became the default cooling option for IT equipment.

Convective airflow cooling is still dominant in data centers, but there is broader
adoption of liquid cooling in gaming, blockchain mining, and HPC applications,
which requires greater compute capacity with special servers. Liquid cooling hasn’t
seen broader adoption across the data center industry, largely because the compute

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demand has been met with increasing the number of logical cores that stay within
reasonable power limits. Additionally, the data center industry, in general, is
conservative, and new technologies and architectures have a slow adoption rate.

There are 2 main categories of liquid cooling – direct to chip (sometimes called
conductive or cold plate) and immersive. From these two categories come a total of
five main liquid cooling methods, as the diagram in Figure 1 depicts (the orange
boxes). In this section, we’ll describe and illustrate each method. The Green Grid
White Paper #70, Liquid Cooling Technology Update also does an excellent job of
classifying the current technologies.

Liquid Cooling

Direct to Chip Immersive

Liquid Cooling Liquid Cooling
Figure 1
Liquid cooling approach
Single-phase IT Chassis
classification
Two-phase Single-phase

Tub / open bath

Single-phase

Two-phase

Direct to chip liquid cooling – single-phase

Direct to chip is where the liquid coolant is taken directly to the hotter components
(CPUs or GPUs) with a cold plate on the chip within the server. The electronic com-
ponents of the IT are not in direct physical contact with the liquid coolant (see Fig-
ure 2). Some designs also include cold plates around memory modules. With this
method, fans are still required to provide airflow through the server to remove resid-
ual heat. This means that conventional air-cooling infrastructure is reduced but still
needed.

ITE fan Cold plate

Figure 2
Diagram of direct to
chip liquid cooling – Water circuit
single-phase I/O

Motherboard Fluid cooler,

CDU, or other
IT chassis heat exchanger

Water or a dielectric liquid can be used as the coolant to the cold plates. Water in-
troduces a downtime risk if there is leakage, but solutions such as leak prevention
systems (LPS) keep the water loop at slight vacuum to mitigate the risk of leaks
within IT equipment.

Fluid manifolds installed at the back of the rack are used to distribute fluid to the IT
equipment, analogous to a rack PDU for electricity. The interface between the

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server and the manifold is typically achieved via a non-spill & non-drip coupling
which ensures cleanliness and safety of the installation. Single-phase means that
the fluid doesn’t change state while taking away the heat. For direct to chip, mainly
single-phase water-based coolants are used, but some designs use engineered die-
lectric fluids.

Direct to chip liquid cooling – two-phase

This method is like the previous method, except that the fluid is two-phase which
means the fluid changes from one state to another – i.e. from liquid to gas in taking
away the heat. Two-phase is better than single-phase (in terms of heat rejection)
but requires additional system controls to ensure proper operation. For two-phase
direct to chip liquid cooling, engineered dielectric fluid is used. This eliminates the
risk of water exposure to the IT equipment. The dielectric vapor can be transported
to a condenser outside or reject its heat to a building water loop. Figure 3 illustrates
this method.

Cold plate with

ITE fan phase change Fluid line Vapor line
Figure 3
Diagram of direct to Fluid/vapor circuit
chip liquid cooling – I/O

two-phase
Motherboard Condenser
via air or water
IT chassis

Immersive liquid cooling – IT chassis – single-phase

With immersive liquid cooling, the liquid coolant is in direct physical contact with the
IT electronic components. The servers are fully or partially immersed in a dielectric
liquid coolant covering the board and the components, which ensures all sources of
heat are removed. This approach uses a single-phase dielectric. With immersive
liquid cooling, all fans within the server can be removed, and all electronics are
placed in an environment which is inherently slow to react to any external changes
in temperature and renders it immune to the influence of humidity and pollutants.
Since there are no fans, this approach operates in near silence.

Figure 4 illustrates the IT chassis single-phase approach to immersive liquid

cooling. The server is encapsulated within a sealed chassis and can be configured
as normal rackmount IT or standalone equipment. The electronic components are
cooled by the dielectric fluid either passively via conduction and natural convection,
or actively pumped (forced convection) within the servers, or a combination of both.
Heat exchangers and pumps can be located inside of the server or in a side ar-
rangement where the heat is transferred from the dielectric to the water loop.

Fluid-to-air
Micro pump Heat exchanger
Figure 4 interface Heatsink
Diagram of immersive liq-
uid cooling – IT chassis – Dielectric circuit Water circuit
single-phase
I/
O

Motherboard Dielectric coolant Fluid cooler,

CDU, or other
heat exchanger
IT chassis

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Immersive liquid cooling – Tub – single-phase

With the tub method (also referred to as open bath), the IT equipment is completely
submerged in the fluid. With traditional IT racks, the servers are horizontally
stacked from the bottom to the top of a rack. However, because this method uses a
tub, it’s like laying a traditional rack of servers on its back. Instead of pulling servers
out on a horizonal plane, tub immersive servers are pulled out on a vertical plane.
Figure 5 illustrates a diagram of this method (orange arrow shows the direction the
servers are pulled out of the tub). Many times, this method incorporates centralized
power supplies to provide power to all the servers within the tub. The heat within
the dielectric fluid is transferred to a water loop via heat exchanger using a pump or
natural convection. This method typically uses oil-based dielectric as the fluid. Note
that the heat exchanger may be installed inside or outside the tub.

Servers are
pulled up Single phase
dielectric coolant

Figure 5
An example of immersive
liquid cooling – tub –
single-phase
Water circuit

Fluid cooler,
Motherboards Pump or Heat
CDU, or other
convection exchanger
heat exchanger

Tub

Immersive liquid cooling – Tub – two-phase

Just like the single-phase tub method, the IT is completely submerged in the fluid.
The difference here is the two-phase dielectric coolant. Again, this means the fluid
changes from one state to another – i.e. from liquid to gas in taking away the heat.
Figure 6 illustrates this architecture. This must be an engineered fluid because of
the phase change required.

Two phase
Condensing coil
dielectric coolant

Water circuit

Figure 6
An example of immersive
liquid cooling – tub –
two-phase Fluid cooler,
CDU, or other
heat exchanger
Motherboards Boiling fluid

Tub

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11 attributes Understanding the benefits and drawbacks of the five major liquid cooling methods
can help data center owners select an appropriate solution for their data centers. In
to consider this section, we describe 11 important attributes to consider when deciding on the
best liquid cooling method for a particular business need.

1. Capital cost
When evaluating liquid cooling, the cost of the whole facility and IT must be consid-
ered. When a facility is greenfield and optimized around liquid cooling, leveraging
warm water and direct rejection via fluid coolers, capex savings can be achieved
over air cooling. If liquid-cooled IT is installed into an existing air-cooled facility, the
retrofit cost can be higher. However, in cases where the data center has stranded
power and space capacity 1, liquid-cooling could free up that stranded power and
space.

• Direct to chip: 50-80% of IT heat capture can happen via liquid cooling.
There is an increased cost to bring water to each rack and distribute it to each
server, but this is offset by a reduction in traditional chillers, CRAHs, and the
supporting power system equipment including transformers and switchgear.
• Immersive: Over 95% of the heat is removed via liquid, allowing for a drastic
reduction in traditional cooling systems. The IT will see an increase in cost
due to the fluids, especially engineered fluids, so it’s important to understand
that tradeoff depending on the immersed technology deployed.

2. Energy cost
Liquid cooling methods have long been known to provide excellent energy efficiency
when compared to air cooling. Hyperscale operators have been able to achieve ex-
cellent PUE for air-cooled data centers, but this is typically done in favorable cli-
mates along with significant amounts of water usage. Another consideration for liq-
uid cooling is the reduction in IT fan energy. This can be a 4-15% savings, which
might lead to worse PUEs despite the fact that the overall electric bill decreases.
Immersive has a slight advantage over direct to chip because all IT fans can be
eliminated. In addition, with immersive, you need less air cooling and thus less
CRAH fans.

Liquid cooling can leverage 45°C/113°F water for cooling, allowing for compressor-
less cooling, most of the year in many climates. For edge applications where air-
cooled DX systems are generally used, the energy savings for liquid cooling is more
dramatic.

3. Serviceability
Data center operators are very familiar with air-cooling systems as it has been used
for decades, however liquid cooling is new for most of the operators. Although the
facility staff can benefit from a reduction in power and cooling equipment to service
and maintain, the IT staff must implement new procedures to maintain the IT equip-
ment.

• Direct to chip: This is similar to an air-cooled server as most components are

accessible in the same manner. A key to making these serviceable is having
dripless connectors to ensure the servers can be racked out and worked on
like traditional air-cooled servers.

1
Stranded power and space occur when the cooling system reaches 100% load but the UPS load is
much lower than 100% and the space is also below 100% utilization.

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• Immersive: This requires new procedures and sometimes new equipment. Oil
baths are the most problematic due to the difficulty of containing the oil as IT
equipment is removed and worked on. Engineered fluids is less difficult than
oil, but care must be taken to ensure fluid cleanliness and to minimize loss /
evaporation due to the higher fluid’s cost. Chassis-based immersion cooling
solutions aim to deliver liquid cooling in familiar form factors and service proce-
dures like those used with standard air-cooled technology. Simple service
tasks can be done while the fluid is still in the chassis. Major work requires
that you pump down the fluid. Considerations here are around how easy is it
to deploy, operate, and maintain the IT equipment. Note that IT equipment re-
liability can increase with this method because IT components are subjected to
a more benign environment.

4. Rack density / compaction

Achieving average rack densities above 20 kW/rack is possible with air cooling, but
significant engineering and cost is required to do so. Both direct to chip and immer-
sive can easily handle 20 kW/rack and have the capability to go over 100 kW/rack.
Immersive can achieve higher densities since no air movement within the IT is
needed.

Both direct to chip and immersive can provide significant compaction over air cool-
ing. Direct to chip and chassis-based immersion can be stacked vertically in a tradi-
tional rack form factor.

5. Water usage
Many air-cooled data centers rely on evaporative cooling with cooling towers to
achieve low PUEs. This consumes high volumes of water. In many parts of the
world this has become problematic. Since liquid cooling can use warm water –
45°C/113°F and sometimes higher, evaporative cooling can be eliminated or drasti-
cally reduced, while still achieving high efficiency.

Since immersive liquid cooling removes a greater percentage of the heat compared
to direct to chip, this method has the advantage of less water usage in the data cen-
ter.

6. Harsh environment
Immersive liquid cooling does not require any airflow and is sealed from the outside
elements and it provides a capability to be placed almost anywhere. This is an ad-
vantage over air cooling and will likely drive immersive liquid-cooled IT at the edge
in harsh environments. This is discussed as a key reason for adoption of liquid cool-
ing in White Paper 279, Five Reasons to Adopt Liquid Cooling.

7. Fan noise / air movement

Anyone who has been inside an operational data center understands the noise of
both the IT and the CRAHs. For some IT applications like occupied office spaces or
clean rooms, quite operation and the elimination of air movement is an important at-
tribute. Direct to chip requires much less airflow, lowering IT and CRAH fan speed
and therefore noise. Immersive liquid cooling requires no fans, allowing for near si-
lent operation indoors with only pumps needed to move the dielectric.

8. Room layout
Because immersive liquid cooling does not require airflow through the IT equipment,
it brings greater flexibility within the data center white space as well as at the edge.
Hot / cold aisle arrangement is no longer required. Back-to-back rows are possible.

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This allows IT to be placed in locations where air cooling might not be feasible. This
can be an important benefit in space-constrained facilities.

Direct to chip still requires a traditional layout since fans remain a part of the IT. Ad-
ditionally, anything in a chassis form factor more easily fits into an existing data cen-
ter layout, which might be advantageous in some cases.

9. Ability to retrofit IT equipment

From a manufacturing standpoint, IT manufacturers interested in creating liquid-
cooled servers are tasked with varying degrees of design work. Direct to chip is
ideal for adapting existing air-cooled servers to remove heat from the chips. Minor
alterations to the IT are required. This allows the existing supply chain to remain vir-
tually unchanged, with just the addition of the cold plates and tubing. However, de-
signing an immersive liquid-cooled server from the ground up requires a lengthier
product development project. None the less, this type of server affords IT equip-
ment designers many more degrees of freedom because they aren’t constrained by
the limitations of air-cooled components.

From a field retrofit standpoint, immersive liquid cooling requires a bath or a new
chassis for the IT, so conversion is costlier. If chassis-based immersion cooling is
brought into an existing data center, it can operate alongside direct to chip and air-
cooled systems very easily. Immersive liquid-cooled IT is not yet readily available
for many configurations.

10. Scalability
Both direct to chip liquid cooling and IT chassis-based immersion liquid cooling have
the ability to scale in smaller increments. Tub-based immersion liquid cooling re-
quires the deployment of the entire tub and fluid, although IT can be deployed incre-
mentally within the tub. Another consideration is understanding single points of fail-
ure in the overall design.

11. Fluid tradeoffs

The type of fluids used in a liquid cooling method is an important consideration in
determining its applicability to a deployment. These are the fluids that remove the
heat directly from the IT. The three main categories are:

• Water based
• Hydrocarbon based oils (dielectric)
• Engineered fluids (dielectric)

Characteristics among these vary, including thermal performance, cost, safety, ma-
terial compatibility, lifespan, maintainability, and sustainability. Table 1 illustrates
which fluids are appropriate for the 5 liquid cooling approaches described in this pa-
per.

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Water Oil Engineered

Liquid cooling method
based based fluids
Direct to chip (single-phase) Yes No Yes
Table 1 Direct to chip (two-phase) No No Yes
Fluid compatibility
with liquid cooling Immersive – chassis (single-phase) No Yes Yes
architectures
Immersive – tub (single-phase) No Yes Yes

Immersive – tub (two-phase) No No Yes

Material compatibility: In any water system, it’s important to minimize corrosion

and maintain water quality. Some materials are incompatible and can lead to early
failures. Condenser water systems have been designed and operated for decades,
so these heat rejection systems are well known. For direct to chip methods, filtration
is important as many cold plates have micro channels that can get clogged due to
poor water quality. For immersive methods, compatibility with IT components is im-
portant. Paper labels on boards coming off, and plasticizers leeching out of cabling
have been issues with some oils and engineered fluids.

Cost: For dielectrics, oil is much cheaper than engineered fluids. The volume of di-
electric needed will vary by technology providers.

Life: Oil tends to have a shorter life than engineered fluids. How often a fluid
needs to be changed will have an overall effect on TCO.

Safety: Flash point, fire point, autoignition point, and toxicity are important consid-
erations, especially when considering insurability of the facility. For example, min-
eral oils are flammable and require safety precautions to prevent fires.

Environmental: Ozone depletion potential (ODP) and global warming potential

(GWP) are two main factors to consider. These values cannot be viewed by them-
selves, as the method used, and rate of vaporization affect release to the environ-
ment. Sealed vs open system, recyclability, etc. all play a role.

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Conclusion While data centers and edge environments today are primarily air cooled, we are
seeing a growing interest and value in adoption of liquid cooling. The applications of
cloud, IoT, AI, and edge are driving the continuous increase of chip and rack power
density. There’s also a continued focus on energy efficiency and cost. For many
applications, liquid cooling is the optimal cooling solution. Direct to chip and immer-
sive liquid cooling are two liquid cooling categories which have benefits for data cen-
ter owners compared to air cooling. In this paper, we explain the differences be-
tween these methods.

• For retrofit sites, rack-based solutions like direct to chip and chassis immersive
liquid cooling provide the easiest transition.
• For new sites, and those in harsh environments, immersive liquid cooling is a
better solution because it can capture all the heat and isolate the IT from the
surrounding air.

Further efforts are necessary for liquid cooling to have broader adoption in the data
center industry, but we believe this technology will have a place in data centers and
edge applications in the coming years.

About the authors

Tony Day is a Director of Business Development within the IT Division’s Office of the CTO at
Schneider Electric. He is responsible for working with clients to develop integrated data center de-
sign solutions. He is a Chartered Architect and mechanical engineer with experience in both indus-
trial engineering and construction industries. Prior to joining Schneider Electric, he worked both in
professional private practice and within commercial organizations with a focus on construction of
highly serviced environments including manufacturing, telecommunications, computer rooms, finan-
cial trading floors and data centers.

Paul Lin is a Research Director at Schneider Electric's Data Center Science Center. He is respon-
sible for data center design and operation research and consults with clients on risk assessment
and design practices to optimize the availability and efficiency of their data center environment.
Before joining Schneider Electric, Paul worked as the R&D Project Leader in LG Electronics for
several years. He is now designated as a “Data Center Certified Associate”, an internationally rec-
ognized validation of the knowledge and skills required for a data center professional. He is also a
registered HVAC professional engineer. Paul holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering
from Jilin University with a background in HVAC and Thermodynamic Engineering.

Robert Bunger is a Project Director within the CTO office at Schneider Electric. In his 21 years at
Schneider Electric, Robert has held management positions in customer service, technical sales,
offer management, business development & industry associations. While with APC / Schneider
Electric, he has lived and worked in the US, Europe, and China. Prior to joining APC, he was a
commissioned officer in the US Navy Submarine force. Robert has a BS in Computer Science from
the US Naval Academy and MS EE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Five Reasons to Adopt Liquid Cooling

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Appendix The thermal conductivity of air, in comparison to liquids like water, is not impressive.
In fact, air is a good insulator in a non-convective environment. Water has a higher
density and greater thermal capacity per pumped unit volume. Table A1 provides
the thermal conductivity and heat capacity comparison between air and water, which
shows that water is a better conductor of heat by a factor of more than 23 compared
with air, and can hold far more heat than air, around 3,243 times more by volume.

Characteristics Air Water

Thermal conductivity 2 under 25°C (W/(m·K)) 0.026 0.6089

Table A1 1.29 1,000

Density (kg/m3)
Comparisons between (1atm, 0°C) (4°C)
air and water Specific heat capacity - 𝐶𝐶�𝑝𝑝� (kJ/(kg·K)) 1.004 4.2

Thermal capacity per unit volume 3 (kJ/(m3·K)) 1.30 4,200

Comparison Benchmark 3,243

Non-pure water is electrically conductive, so it cannot be used to directly cool IT

components. Alternatively, electrically non-conductive dielectric materials such as
mineral oils and engineered dielectric fluid coolants, can be in direct contact with op-
erating electrical components and provide excellent heat removal capability. As an
example, oil has been used in electrical transformers for many years and allows for
effective heat transfer from the internal coil and core to the outer casing.

The following heat transfer formula describes how heat is removed from an object,
like the surface of a CPU or GPU:

𝑄𝑄=ℎ𝐴𝐴(𝑇𝑇𝑠𝑠−𝑇𝑇coolant)

• ℎ is the heat transfer coefficient

• A is the available heat dissipation surface area
• Ts is the temperature of surface dissipating heat
• 𝑇𝑇coolant is the temperature of the coolant used for cooling

As related to this formula, a heat sink’s purpose is to increase the heat dissipation
area. The heat transfer coefficient of air under forced convection is around 100
W/(m 2·K), and the value for water is around 3,000, which means that compared with
air, water can transfer much more heat by a factor of 30 times. We also know that
water has a much higher thermal capacity than air, which also means when we
transfer the same amount of heat from IT devices, the flowrate for liquid is much
lower than air, which can save a significant amount of energy.

2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity
3
Thermal capacity per unit volume equals density times specific heat capacity.

Liquid Cooling Technologies for Data Centers and Edge Applications