COMPACT THERMAL MODEL FOR THE TRANSIENT TEMPERATURE PREDICTION OF A WATER-COOLED MICROCHIP MODULE IN LOW CARBON EMISSION COMPUTING

This article presents a compact computational model for the rapid determination of the junction temperature of a chip cooled with a heat sink, exploring the concept of hot water cooled electronics as a strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. The model aims at rapid simulations of variations of the chip, as well as the heat sink outlet water tem-peratures during transient heat loads. The model is validated by experimental tests with a water-cooled manifold microchannel (MMC) heat sink, which is designed to cool the pro-cessors of state-of-the-art servers. The chip temperature is determined subject to periodic heat loads as large as 100W with frequencies in the range from 1 to 10Hz. The results show that to calculate 1 s of real temperature variation requires less than 20 s of computational time on a Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2350, 2GHz desktop PC with 4GB RAM. The ther-mal response of the heat sink to real-time power traces with durations up to 200 s is modeled for different flow rates. The simulations indicate that application of a flow-control feedback loop could achieve more than 50 % reduction in water flow rate, without compromising the maximal chip temperatures. 1