Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT) has received two subcontracts of federal funding totaling $1.1m for data center cooling solutions.
The funding, provided by the US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), is part of the Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS) program.
The program aims to develop high-performance and energy-efficient cooling solutions for data centers.
The first subcontract ACT has received is with Intel in collaboration with Purdue University to work on two-phase immersion cooling for high thermal design power. The companies aim to develop two-phase immersion cooling for server devices up to 2kW using heat sinks by Topology Optimization.
ACT will give feedback on designs, fabricate the prototypes, and test them. The three-year program ultimately aims to demonstrate thermal resistance, from chip to coolant, of less than 0.01 kW, for total data center server powers of 10-100kW.
ACT's second subcontract is to team up with the University of Missouri to develop a "Dual-Mode Hybrid Two-Phase Loop for Data Center Cooling." This is hoped to be a scalable cooling solution for data centers.
ACT will support hardware development and testing tasks for loads up to 10kW.
"We are excited to be part of two teams that are selected to receive funding from ARPA-E under the COOLERCHIPS program. It is a testament to ACT's capabilities and engineering experience in developing next-generation cooling technologies," said Dr. William Anderson, chief engineer of ACT. "The resulting technologies will enable high rack power density and increase system reliability while at the same time reducing power consumption. This will in turn reduce carbon footprint and position the US at the forefront of data center cooling."
The COOLERCHIPS program was launched in September 2022 with a target of reducing the total cooling energy expenditure to less than five percent of a typical data center’s IT load at any time and any US location for a high-density compute system.
In May 2023, the DOE announced it would spend $40 million on 15 projects as part of the COOLERCHIPS initiative. Both the University of Missouri and Intel projects were announced at the time, though ACT has only recently become involved.
