Study on heat transfer performance of immersion system based on SiC/white mineral oil composite nanofluids

With the rapid development of the global digital economy, the number and size of data centers are also expanding. The high energy consumption of data centers has become a highly concerned issue in the industry. Immersion cooling is a thermal strategy for servers with high heat flux density in data centers. The low thermal conductivity of its working medium has become the main bottleneck hindering its application. In this study, the performance of heat transfer of the SiC/white mineral oil-based nanofluids as new coolant and oil as traditional coolant under different heat loads are presented. The heat transfer capacity in different application scenarios is explored. The results of the simulations show that with the new coolant, the maximum surface heat transfer coefficient of bare heat source is increased by 11.3% at 100 W. With heatsink and heat pipe auxiliary cooling, the maximum increase is 11.7% and 10.7%, respectively, at 300 W. The contour pictures reveal a considerable decrease of surface and internal high-temperature area using heatsink and heat pipe auxiliary cooling. The analysis of the economy and reliability of the new working fluid concludes that the PUE (Power usage effectiveness) of the new working fluid only increases by 0.07–0.03%, which is negligible. Lastly, after three months of repeated experiments, the average increase in temperature is 0.4–2.3%. It means that the new coolant has good stability and reliability, which proves it has good application prospect in submerged cooling system.