Integrating Digital Twin Technology for Real Time Blockage Detection in Water Cooled Electronics

This paper presents a culmination of research into integrating Digital Twin (DT) technology in water-cooled electronic systems to improve system reliability by detecting faults in the cooling system that maintains the proper operation of heat-producing electronic components and systems. A DT is a virtual representation of a physical twin (PT). This PT can represent real-world systems, individual components, or processes. Using the DT, operators can gain insight into the behavior and characteristics of the PT, thereby facilitating informed decisions to improve its health and optimize processes. The DT system is designed to detect obstructions forming in the waste heat-producing components within a liquid-based cooling system. The DT accomplishes this by emulating the thermal behavior of the system and its response to blockage formations. Detecting these formations is critical to the system's health, as blockages can lead to loss of coolant flow and subsequent overheating of the affected component. This leads to performance degradation and damage to the affected component(s). A temperature-based detection method, using thermocouples, is used as it offers a cost-effective and more straightforward alternative to detecting coolant loss compared to flow devices like flow meters. This is due to the relatively simple operating principle and low average unit cost of thermocouples compared to most flow meters. By comparing the thermal behavior to the PT, the DT enables real-time monitoring and detection of blockage formations, thus allowing corrective actions to be quickly implemented. The DT automatically diagnoses blockages in the cooling channels using a series of abnormal thermal behavior triggers and alerts operators or controllers. A simulated Physical Twin Emulator (PTE) and real-world testbed cooling system were created to evaluate the developed DT's effectiveness. The DT was calibrated through thermal characterization experiments, and its blockage detection capabilities were tested in the emulator and the physical testbed. During PTE testing at near-total (98.5%) blockage conditions, the DT detected the formation of blockages in the affected component in 1.33 minutes during a heating profile of 125W (overtemperature reached >80 °C ~ five minutes after blockage introduction) and 1.58 minutes during a cooling profile (225W initial, lowering to 25W). When under multiple 80\% blockages (125 watts), detection required 5.66 minutes, as activation of all abnormal thermal triggers required additional time. In real-world testing using a prototype liquid cooled testbed, the DT successfully alerted the operator to a near-total blockage 1.27 minutes after introducing a near-total (~90%) blockage (200-watt input). Overall, this research demonstrates the potential use of DTs for blockage detection in water-cooled electronic systems.