SBIR-STTR Award

This phase I proposal will support exploratory research and development to lower the cost of our fluid submersion cooling technology for data centers by 20%. The research will focus on increased efficiency of coolant flow and expanded server capacity for our system. The end goal of Phase I is to design and build a cooling system with the researched improvements, and conduct field trials at a third party facility to verify both the cost and energy savings.

Benefit:
Data centers use nearly 3% of US electricity, up from 1% in 2000. Nearly half of that is driven by cooling - which includes both exterior cooling as well as internal server fans. Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) can lower complete cooling costs by 95% by moving to a much more efficient cooling solution, fluid submersion cooling. Also, because the remaining server power is turned into heated fluid at up to 125° F, Green Revolution Cooling can reuse the remaining power in the form of hot water to heat a building or water supply, for a near net-zero data center energy usage. This makes it the only proven technology that can eliminate nearly all of the power in a data center, regardless of hardware or workload run. GRC's technology is being adopted in the high performance cooling segment due its superior cooling performance for high density applications, and this proposal will drive costs down to also appeal to the cost-conscious low and mid density data centers, which make up the bulk of US data centers. Once this technology is widely adopted, data centers will drastically reduce their energy consumption and be seen as models of efficiency.

Keywords:
Data Center, Cooling, Fluid Submersion, Green, Efficient

Green Revolution Cooling, an Austin, Texas-based manufacturer of submersion cooling systems for high-efficiency, high-performance data centers, aims to produce a commercially viable, all-in-one containerized data center cooling solution for cost-effective and expedited data center build-out and expansion. Featuring total submersion of computer equipment in high performance dielectric coolant, the technology replaces air conditioning and air-handling infrastructure with liquid cooling.

Benefit:
Containerization of submersion cooling technology from Green Revolution Cooling enables the elimination of all costly air-handling equipment associated with traditional data centers. As a result, build-up and build-out of a data center becomes up to 60% less expensive, with up to 50% less continuous energy use up to 400% more heat dissipation per square foot of data center space. The applications of the technology are myriad but the product generally will appeal greatly to data center operators that are confined by one or more of the following factors: physical space, resource cost, build-out time, hazardous environment, and compute throughput. This containerized solution, when fully developed during the course of the Phase II award, will dramatically reduce data center installation time, data center build out costs, and capital expenditure requirements for new data center space. The containerized solution will essentially be a “plug-and-play” data center.

Keywords:
data center, cooling, containerized, modular, submersion, immersion