If You Think Liquid Cooling is an Issue

If You Think Liquid Cooling is an Issue – It’s Not

Our Guests:

Greg Ducharme, Product Director, Laird Thermal Systems
Vineet Barot, Technical Support Manager of Thermal, Sager Electronics

Often, companies want to avoid liquid cooling technology because they believe it adds a layer of complexity to already-complex operations, but we’re here with experts from Laird Thermal and Sager Electronics to show you that’s not the case.

Market Overview

Liquid cooling has been a growing market for decades now. Heat densities are always rising because of equipment, as well as instruments getting smaller and becoming more powerful. Decades ago, air cooling was sufficient for several applications, but it no longer is. Companies now are relying on liquid cooling more and more, which introduces a different variety of fashions in terms of how they're cooling the liquid that's being used to cool their instrument.

Applications

The bulk of liquid cooling applications are in the industrial and analytical space. There are also some other applications in medical. Lasers are a good example of equipment that requires cooling, and when you look at the efficiency of lasers, only a limited amount of the input power is then converted into actual laser power, and so the rest of that needs to be cooled somehow. The bigger the laser, the more cooling required.

There are also many applications within the analytical space that require liquid cooling, but not as much from a bulk heat removal perspective. Instead, they're working on thermal stability. So, when you think about all these very precise instruments that are trying to generate data for analysis, whether it be a mass spectrometer or electron microscopes, these require precise operating environments in order to get precise results.

And let’s talk chillers...

In the liquid cooling world, there's a relationship between the amount of heat that needs to be cooled and at what temperature it needs to be cooled at. The more heat you start rejecting, the more energy that needs to be transferred away from the equipment. In this case, we tend to gravitate toward liquid cooling.

As the setpoint becomes lower, we gravitate towards chillers. Chillers, the industry term for cooling systems that use refrigerants, cool below ambient temperatures. When we're talking about above ambient temperatures, it tends to be more of a bulk heat removal application. The best example, in terms of liquid cooling, is an x-ray tube. X-ray tubes are notoriously inefficient. There's a lot of heat being rejected, but they're not really concerned with precise temperature control. They're more concerned with just keeping the tube from getting to a point where it's going to fail.

Want to learn more about liquid cooling tech and chillers? Dive into this video where we talk more about selecting products and tackle some of the common questions out there about the technology. For example: