Introduction Heat from electronic devices is an integral part of information processing, not a nuisance that can someday be eliminated. This is a physical principle that is independent of the device of information processing. However, when viewed in the historical perspective, the severity of heat problems has not monotonically increased. It came to the fore some time ago, … [Read more...]
Keep Cool by Sensing Current to Control Fans
Control of cooling fans has become increasingly popular as efforts are made to reduce system power consumption and mechanical fan noise. The purpose of including a fan is to reduce temperature and keep it as low as possible. Mean time to failure for a variety of systems increases rapidly as temperature elevates. This has brought about a wide choice of thermally based fan … [Read more...]
Recognizing the Limits of Conventional Axial Hub-Motor AHS Devices
Conventional axial hub-motor AHS (Active Heatsink) devices (Figure 1) have reached their functional and cost limits and may not be improved significantly. These devices have a number of inherent, severe contradictions (design limitations) that determine the "evolutionary maturity" of this concept. Figure 1. Conventional axial hub-motor AHS. Let us look at different … [Read more...]
Numerical Modeling and Experimental Verification of High-density Servers
High-density hardware and software are developed as part of an initiative to greatly increase data center compute densities. Concept systems presented here are based on the Intel® Itanium™ processor family and are designed for a 1U rack-mount form factor. The current dual-processor system concept is targeted at the front-end server market (e.g., web hosting and mail routing), … [Read more...]
Quick and easy fan/sink characterization
It is often necessary to generate in-house pressure-drop and base-to-ambient thermal resistance data for ducted fan/heat sink assemblies. For reliable applicability of the performance data, the configuration of the test article should closely match the intended application so that the test article coolant flow characteristics (turbulence level, 3-dimensionality, etc.) match … [Read more...]
