Designing environmentally sustainable electronic cooling systems using exergo-thermo-volumes

Abstract

SUMMARYThermo-volumes allow the design engineer to expediently understand the thermal resistance of a given cooling solution (an indicator of performance) along with its flow resistance (an indicator of the pumping power, or energy consumption, which will be required by the fluid handler). In the present work, we expand upon thermo-volumes by including the lifetime exergy cost (in units of Joules of availability destroyed) as a means to enable the consideration of resource consumption (and thus the environmental sustainability) of the cooling solution.To achieve these exergo-thermo-volumes, we reinterpret previous definitions of thermo-volumes in terms of the entropy generated during heat transfer and fluid flow. The Guoy-Stodola theorem is used to convert this entropy generation into an 'operational' exergy loss. Next, based on the material choice and assembly processes used in creating the product, an embedded exergy consumption that accounts for the amount of exergy destroyed during extraction, transportation and disposal of the material is attached to the operational exergy loss. Thus, the total 'cradle-to-cradle' exergy loss of the solution is devised. In this framework, the optimal solution will be that which destroys the minimal amount of exergy. Correspondingly, instead of relying upon the coefficient of performance (which is focused on operational consumption), we propose evaluation of cooling solutions in terms of the heat removal capacity per unit lifetime exergy consumption.The paper concludes by illustrating applicability of the method to the design of an enterprise server. It should be noted that although the paper is focused on electronics cooling solutions, the methodology is designed to be sufficiently general for use in any thermal management application.

Optimizing data center cooling infrastructures using exergothermovolumes

“…To achieve such objectives, previous researchers [1] [2] have considered two separate and distinct approaches embraced in system design: (i) Thermovolumes [3] [4], which have been used for over a decade to optimize the thermal performance of a given system (in terms of heat removed) relative to the cost of operating the system (pumping power); and (ii) Lifetime Exergy Consumption [5][6][7][8][9][10], which uses the metric of available energy use (exergy consumed) as a proxy to approximate the cradle-to-cradle environmental footprint of the solution.…”

“…Shah and Patel [1] then propose the following exergo-thermovolume (ETV) metric to design heat transfer systems that remove the maximum amount of heat (thermal performance) relative to the minimum amount of embedded exergy consumption (sustainable) while optimizing the operational exergy loss, or entropy generated during runtime (cost): …”

Electronics Cooling System and Component Design According to the Second Law

“…Exergy analyses have been conducted on a large variety of thermal systems [4,6,7] as there are heat pump systems [10], thermal storage systems [11], drying processes [12], power plants [13] as well as on cooling systems for electronics [14]. The latter are of special interest to this paper.…”

“…The latter are of special interest to this paper. Erom packaging level [14,15] to data center level [16], electronics cooling has been a popular domain of application for the second law of thermodynamics.…”

Combined heat and power generation via hybrid data center cooling‐polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell system

“…For this purpose, different waste heat utilization strategies were developed such as district heating and clean water generation, 13 absorption cooling, 14 power generation, 15 and combined heating and cooling, 16 whereas their design procedures were built according to the sustainability criteria. 17 Ebrahimi et al 13,18 stated that the power generation is the most feasible method to reuse the released heat from DCs. However, as far as we know, the number of research to utilize the waste heat of DCs in the power generation is very limited (see Reference 15) and generally applied for the air-cooled DC systems.…”