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Data centers at the heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution could be cooled more effectively and economically with a hybrid system under development at the University of Waterloo that targets hotspots on computer chips with a single drop of boiling coolant.

The novel concept combines general immersion cooling with inexpensive deionized water and targeted spot cooling of especially hot areas with drops of costly coolant.

"It's a division of labor," said Dr. Sushanta Mitra, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at Waterloo. "Water is excellent at handling steady, everyday heat and the drops take care of sudden spikes."

To deal with the enormous amount of heat generated in sprawling data centers, operators are increasingly immersing electronic components such as chips and processors in specialized coolants.

Depending on the workload, small areas in chips can get much hotter than others in a matter of seconds, causing them to slow down, age faster and undermine reliability. Coolant that simply flows by is too slow to react to the sudden hotspots.

The research team—which included Dr. D. student Arnav Banerjee—tackled that problem by building on previous work to encapsulate one liquid in a thin skin of another. The study, "A hybrid immersion cooling assisted by liquid-liquid encapsulation: A game changer for thermal management of transient hotspots," is published in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science .

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