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The Need for Energy-Efficient Thermal Management
Cooling requirements for electronic and other
microsystems have evolved significantly over the past two decades. As
the levels of functionality and speed increase dramatically, high
performance, high reliability, and energy efficient cooling techniques
are urgently needed. A server farm or data center consists of thousands
of racks with multiple computing units. The heat dissipation from a
single rack containing such units exceeds 10 kW.
As an example, today's typical data center, with
1000 racks, occupies 30,000 square feet and requires 10 MW of power for
the computing infrastructure. A 100,000 square foot data center of the
future will require 50 MW of power for the computing infrastructure.
The cooling for such a data center will consume an additional 25 MW of
power. Such a data center could cost approximately $45 million each
year(@$100/MWh) just to power the servers and $22 million a year to
power the cooling (Data from C. Patel, et. al, ITHERM 2002). Energy efficiency is the key to
containing these costs.
Investigating boiling from
microfabricated structures
for the cooling of microelectronic components.
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