Thermal Performance of Solid Interface Materialsin Immersion Cooling for Data Centers

As the development of more and more powerful and transistor-dense processors continues, following the demandof cloud-based services, data storage and the proliferation of AI, coupled with the failure of Dennard scaling,the thermal output density of high-performance processors has increased significantly in latter years. Thus,the need for heat management to safeguard performance and hardware has become a pressing need; a needseemingly necessitating a move to liquid cooling from air cooling, among which, single-phase immersion coolingis among the emerging alternatives. After an overview of the state-of-the-art on processor thermal management, the main part of the thesis isan experimental investigation of the performance of solid thermal interface materials in single-phase immersioncooling. To achieve this, tests were performed on an immersion cooling testbed using thermal test vehicles(TTVs) which mimic the thermal output of CPUs. The results showed that of the tested materials indiumfoil, pyrolytic graphite sheet and graphene composite, the thermal pads of graphene composite consistentlyperformed the best, and produced the lowest temperature.