Cooling data centers is a multi-billion dollar problem - now researchers want to use a common cooling mechanism found in animals to solve it

Date:
Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:02:00 +0000

Description:
Fiber membrane tech inspired by sweating could help data centers cut energy use by improving heat management systems.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Evaporat ive cooling, like sweating, could reduce energy use in data centers New fiber membrane handles heat with zero added energy use Researchers retool
filtration material to cool electronics passively

As AI and cloud computing grow, the rising demand for data processing is driving up heat output, with cooling already making up nearly 40% of a data center's energy use and projected to more than double worldwide by 2030.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new cooling technology that mimics the way animals regulate body temperature through sweating.

The passive system removes heat from electronics using evaporation, offering
a potential alternative to traditional cooling methods in data centers and other high-powered computing environments. Finding the sweet spot

The core of the system is a fiber membrane with a network of tiny, interconnected pores that use capillary action to draw cooling liquid across the surface.

As the liquid evaporates, it efficiently removes heat without requiring extra energy.

Compared to traditional air or liquid cooling, evaporation can dissipate higher heat flux while using less energy, said Renkun Chen, a professor in
the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. Chen co-led the project with professors Shengqiang Cai and Abhishek Saha.

The research was published in the journal Joule , explaining how Chens team, including Ph.D. student Tianshi Feng and postdoctoral researcher Yu Pei, tested the membrane under variable heat conditions.

It handled over 800 watts per square centimeter of heat, a record for this type of cooling system. It also performed consistently over several hours.

Traditional porous membranes have often failed due to clogging or boiling. Chen explained that the team found a sweet spot with the membranes pore size and structure.

These fiber membranes were originally designed for filtration, and no one had previously explored their use in evaporation," said Chen. "We recognized that their unique structural characteristics - interconnected pores and just the right pore size - could make them ideal for efficient evaporative cooling. What surprised us was that, with the right mechanical reinforcement, they not only withstood the high heat fluxthey performed extremely well under it.

The researchers believe the membrane is still operating below its full potential.

They are now refining the design and working on ways to integrate it into
cold plates, flat devices used to cool chips like CPUs and GPUs.

The group is also preparing to commercialize the technology through a
startup. Their goal is to provide scalable, low-energy cooling solutions as global data demand continues to grow.

Via Tech Xplore You may also like One of world's largest oil companies just launched a unique cooling fluid for data centers and AI chips I sat down with two cooling experts to find out what AI's biggest problem is in the data center Cooling high-density data centers with coolant distribution units



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/cooling-data-centers-is-a-multi-billion-dollar-p roblem-researchers-want-to-use-a-common-cooling-mechanism-found-in-animals-to- solve-that-issue


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)