Startup Uses SpaceX Tech to Cool Data Centers With Less Power and No Water (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0180656592
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/26/0317225/startup-uses-spacex-tech-to-cool-data-centers-with-less-power-and-no-water
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/l-startup-uses-spacex-tech-175628363.html
> Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company's efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%.
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> Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat. A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city... Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center's power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day...
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> U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency... The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year... To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute — nearly [2]10 times faster than traditional compressors — to move heat...
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> About a third of Karman's 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors. The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy. Karman's heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation.
The company "recently raised $20 million," according to the article, "and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year...."
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/l-startup-uses-spacex-tech-175628363.html
[2] https://www.trane.com/content/dam/Trane/Commercial/global/learning-center/engineers-newsletters/APP-PRC006A-EN_02252021.pdf
A special kind of carbon dioxide (Score:2)
Are we talking isotopes or just especially cold?
Re: A special kind of carbon dioxide (Score:1)
It has the rarer form with 18 atomic weight oxygen which is another stable isotope so is slightly more efficent...ok that's bullshit it's just regular co2 but just think of them using that $1600 a liter tank stuff for snooty investors who use gold plated monster cables
using water in a closed loop system is irrelevant (Score:3)
It doesn't matter if you use water to cool in a closed loop system. The problem is only if you're using fresh water and just heating it up and dumping it and pulling in more fresh water.
So in this case, it's completely irrelevant.
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I don't understand all the babble. Why not just copy the cooling system in an ICE car? I don't get why it isn't a closed loop system, and why they need so much water.
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The radiators get awful big at MWs of power and only 25 or so degrees C relative to ambient. So you spray water on them and they work a lot better.
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Or rather you just spray the hot water into the air, I forgot how they worked.
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Our evaporative coolers look like a tower, but with the middle section open to the air.
At the top of the tower (hot side) are sprinklers, at the bottom is a pool (cold side).
I.e., it's a closed loop, with biocide and lost water injection into the loop.
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Actually it's a combination of both. Most cooling systems have a closed loop and an evaporative one with heat exchangers involved moving heat from one to another. The reason being you want to carefully control the chemistry of the liquid required to get heat from a concentrated area (such as the fins on a waterblock on your CPUs), but don't want the expense of blasting that expensive liquid into the air.
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they use the heat of evaporation of water to cool the hot refrigerant and release that to the atmosphere, because it's more efficient than just air cooling.
it's somewhat like setting up a small water sprayer on your AC condenser outside. (they actually sell kits... and iirc they're cost effective, though I've never tried one).
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The water is the coolant in our evap systems in our datacenters.
We have cooling towers that directly evaporatively cool the loop (and replace lost water, inject biocides, etc)
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Directly? I find that hard to believe. Are you sure you're not running two loops with a heat-exchanger between? That would be how nearly every other datacentre in the world works regardless if the actual cooling element is liquid or air via a chiller. My mind would be blown if the actual liquid hitting your servers isn't running in a closed loop as you would expose yourself to a world of hurt with water chemistry having to have that continuously replaced and bio controlled. It's hard enough to prevent growt
Re: (Score:2)
> Directly? I find that hard to believe.
Alright.
> Are you sure you're not running two loops with a heat-exchanger between?
Yes.
> That would be how nearly every other datacentre in the world works regardless if the actual cooling element is liquid or air via a chiller.
Incorrect. Though many very large systems do for obvious reasons. The larger the loop, the more work you need, and not to mentioned a generally larger pumping requirement. There's also the limitations that you had better hope you never have high humidity, or freezing temps. Not a problem in our area.
> My mind would be blown if the actual liquid hitting your servers isn't running in a closed loop
You mean near our servers, I imagine... I was definitely not trying to imply that we're pumping this shit into water blocks on our CPUs.
> as you would expose yourself to a world of hurt with water chemistry having to have that continuously replaced and bio controlled.
We had problems at first. Once we got the chemical and biologic
Re: using water in a closed loop system is irrelev (Score:2)
Many, many cooling systems use direct evaporation. Especially, but not only, in drier environments.
There are maintenance concerns, but the operating and initial capital costs are lower for those systems, so they are attractive on that level.
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> It doesn't matter if you use water to cool in a closed loop system.
The closed part of the closed loop system only moves heat from one area to another. There's a whole different part of the system involved in actually moving that heat out to the environment, that system is open. The water consumption being discussed is usually due to evaporative cooling - which is still the cheapest way to run a cooling system unless you have a specific environment that allows for some other alternative (e.g. dumping heat into a river).
How does that work? (Score:3)
> The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide...
As far as I can tell, the only way CO2 can be "special" is if it's in a liquid state. (Normally, it transitions between solid and gas with no intermediate liquid state, but it does become liquid at about a little over 5 bars). But liquid CO2 is commonly used for preserving food and in other industries, so I'm confused as to what might be special about the stuff they plan to use for cooling data centres.
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> But liquid CO2 is commonly used for preserving food and in other industries, so I'm confused as to what might be special about the stuff they plan to use for cooling data centres.
What's special is they're using a high-tech emulsion - liquid CO2 blended with equal parts Elonium and Baloneum.
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I saw that in a motion picture once - Return of the Jedi.
'Carbonite' was used as a liquid solution for cryostasis.
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Some gasses work better than others for given temperatures in heat-pumps. CO2 is best suited to very high temperatures, like increasing the temp from say 50C coming from the GPU to say 90C.
It's sometimes used for domestic hot water heat pumps, mainly in Japan because they do love their baths and hotter water means it can use a smaller tank to fill the tub.
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I think it's just an article written by a generalist so I think he means to say "special refrigerant"
as in different from what's used in normal HVAC and is probably unfamiliar that, as you say, it's existing technology
e.g. [1]https://www.scmfrigo.com/en/bl... [scmfrigo.com]
the only new thing mentioned is maybe using some snake faster compressors... but it's not mentioned of those are more efficient somehow.
[1] https://www.scmfrigo.com/en/blog/co2-refrigeration-system-how-it-works/
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"Special" here means supercritical, because apparently the editors at the LA Times don't trust their readers with words of more than four syllables.
Apart from that, I don't know. I've seen press releases disguised as news before but this one really takes the biscuit. I think they're plugging some kind of pump, because engineers are always coming up with ways to use supercritical CO2 for seemingly random things (I read an article about thirty years ago for using it in industrial dishwashers ) and the idea of
How is this supposed to help? (Score:2)
When it's hot outside, you could probably get the radiator temp difference to ambient around 2x higher with the heatpump at good COP. If radiator cooling requires too much radiator volume with normal liquid cooling, 2x is unlikely to make the difference.
Cooling towers with evaporation are used because of the far higher power density they allow.
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> Cooling towers with evaporation are used because of the far higher power density they allow.
Yup. This is why we swapped out our traditional refrigerant HVACs. Denser, and cheaper. Though part of that reduced cost is the fact that we get too good of a price on the water we use.
Who uses fans to circulate liquid anything? (Score:3)
From the summary:
> "its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans."
So these guys thought that a common way to circulate liquid CO2 is using fans?!? Or was it just the AI that wrote the startup's business plan, or perhaps just this announcement, its summary?
Re: Who uses fans to circulate liquid anything? (Score:2)
And since when is a turbopump âoeSpaceX technologyâ, as if no one had done it before.
Predictions-schmedictions... (Score:2, Interesting)
> U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency...
Is the bubble going to last that long? I have some doubts.