Close cooling tower for data center Part.II -- HuaTal Cooling Tower

Currently, the most advantageous heat conduction medium is water. Some people summarized water as a refrigerant as follows: "water and other liquids have more potential as refrigerants than air, so they are often used for high density equipments cooling. But it's important to remember that we're not cooling by control the heat source, but removing the heat away, so the heat evacuation has to be efficient and precise." Water as a refrigerant has been used in mainframe cooling for decades. However, the application of mainframe in data center is gradually reduced, and water cooling is also eliminated before 2010s. But since air is no longer enough to cool high density data center devices, water or liquid cooling has been picked up again and is seen as a future way for data center cooling.

The essence of water-cooling technology boils down to two things: 1st, the usage of water, as a conductor it never comes into direct contact with the data center devices. As a result, water in the data center can only be used as a transmission medium for evacuation heat. Because of the nature of the water, it is necessary to use high-tech piping system to separate water and devices strictly. " Many data centers that didn't apply water-cooling is considered it is a bad idea to have water so close to IT equipment. But actually,  with a properly designed system, water should not have access to the devices, so all the risks can be easily avoided." Of course, this particular cooling infrastructure also increased the cost of the data center, especially the water chiller and the oversupply of pipes, but for high-density supercomputers and high-performance equipment, the energy-saving and anti-scaling benefits of liquid cooling can reduce the daily operation cost.\

Water or liquid cooling is not necessarily limited to large data centers, although cost is a major consideration. In fact, more and more data centers of all sizes are experimenting with liquid cooling, especially the large and medium-sized data centers that are rapidly adopting high-density computing. In other words, the higher the power density of the data center, the more water cooling will be adopted.

Closed circuit water cooling solution has long existed in the data center, to some extent, never left, it is certainly not a universal option. but its future looks brighter. Water is not the first choice for cooling computer equipment, but it is increasingly advantageous in large, particularly high-density data centers. The water's connection to mainframes may allow IT to continue to serve cutting-edge supercomputers and other IT equipment. With the increasing IT demand, IT will be more and more likely for data center managers to use closed cooling tower solutions to cope with high-density computing in the current data center project to build or expand on the basis of existing resources.