Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing-Based Design of a Heat Sink for Single-Phase Natural Convection Immersion Cooling Application

Abstract

To fulfill the increasing data processing demands within modern data centers, a corresponding increase in server performance is necessary. This leads to subsequent increases in power consumption and heat generation in the servers due to high-performance processing units. Currently, air cooling is the most widely used thermal management technique in data centers, but it has started to reach its limitations in cooling of high-power density packaging. Therefore, industries utilizing data centers are looking to single-phase immersion cooling to reduce the operational and cooling costs by enhancing the thermal management of servers. In this study, heat sinks with triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) lattice structures were designed for application in single-phase immersion cooling of data center servers. These designs are made possible by electrochemical additive manufacturing (AM) technology due to their complex topologies. The electrochemical additive manufacturing process allows for generation of complex heat sink geometries not possible using traditional manufacturing processes. Geometric complexities including amorphous and porous structures with high surface area to volume ratio enable electrochemical additive manufacturing heat sinks to have superior heat transfer properties. Our objective is to compare various heat sink geometries by minimizing max case temperature in a single-phase immersion cooling setup for a natural convection setup. Computational fluid dynamics in ansysfluent is utilized to compare the electrochemical additive manufacturing heat sink designs. The additively manufactured heat sink designs are evaluated by comparing their thermal performance under natural convection conditions. This study presents a novel approach to heat sink design and bolsters the capability of electrochemical additive manufacturing-produced heat sinks.