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Yan
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What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:20 pm

Does water cooling really use water, or another liquid?

The building where I work was recently closed because of a "dangerous spill". The spill turned out to be the liquid from a server cooling system.

Obviously that's not good for the server and can cause an electrical short, but is the liquid dangerous in itself?
 
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:37 pm

Consumer water cooling systems typically use water with additives to inhibit corrosion and microorganism growth.

For large-scale datacenter systems it will depend on the cooling system. I imagine there are some high performance systems which use a compressor/condenser loop like you'd have in an air conditioning system, in which case it would be using some sort of refrigerant.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:47 pm

Yan wrote:
Does water cooling really use water, or another liquid?


Yes. Water has a very high specific heat and very high thermal conductivity. Basically, outside of like mercury or something, it's basically the best and is obviously ubiquitous.

Sometimes people add chemical additives as "wetters", I'm not really sure why that would be better than plain old distilled water, but it's a thing.

But, yes, it's really just water.

Yan wrote:
The building where I work was recently closed because of a "dangerous spill". The spill turned out to be the liquid from a server cooling system.


Commercial/industrial air conditioning often uses ammonia as a refrigerant. That might be what that was.

That's separate from water cooling though, which isn't really like common for servers or anything.

EDIT: Like, if they shut the BUILDING down, it was probably a large like car-size commercial unit, potentially on the roof but definitely right near that buildling, that had a leak.

EDIT2: and if you need serious industrial cooling, you have giant cooling towers that use water, whether in giant loops exchanged with air or simply just evaporative entirely.

Water is the best. :wink:
Last edited by Glorious on Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:51 pm

Glorious wrote:
Commercial/industrial air conditioning often uses ammonia as a refrigerant. That might be what that was.

My sister and her husband own an ice business. You know, the 5lb bags of cubes you get at the corner store. Their entire cooling cycle is built on pure anhydrous ammonia. They run a full-on disaster drill with the local FD every year.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:55 pm

I've heard of some using anti-freeze as an additive also, but I doubt that'd be done professionally, and it's obviously pants on head stupid unless there's a chiller involved also. Once you go to the trouble of setting all that up you might as well just get an LN2 pot and forgo "water" cooling altogether.

Anti-freeze, while harmful isn't really what you think of as a "toxic spill" either.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 5:05 pm

As another addition to my SECOND EDIT, those options only take you to AMBIENT, which for many industrial purposes is fine. They have tremendous capacity, but the floor is today's forecast.

You want sub-ambient, like Ned's sister, yes, you need some sort refrigerant, and ammonia is actually really good--but toxic. Other good ones are like propane, but that's flammable. Then there are CFCs which are slightly worse but aren't toxic or flammable, but they eat the ozone layer.

Anyway, ammonia is a common choice. It's toxic, but it smells to high heaven and you can detect it with the mark I nose at like single-digits of PPM.

So we don't tend to use it in consumer applications, toxic (and also eats copper with water, despite the name, there is always going to be -some- moisture in your anhydrous ammonia), and we're usually not so efficient already given the scale + situation.

It's common in larger, commercial, scales though. And, yeah, if it leaks you are evacuating the building etc...
 
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 5:09 pm

I've heard of some using anti-freeze as an additive also, but I doubt that'd be done professionally, and it's obviously pants on head stupid unless there's a chiller involved also. Once you go to the trouble of setting all that up you might as well just get an LN2 pot and forgo "water" cooling altogether.


Yeah, exactly. Outside of anti-corrosion/anti-microbial like JBI said, if you are ambient water cooling you're just decreasing efficiency, if anything. And if we are talking about a chiller in the loop, if computer you are cooling is running, how do we get below freezing? Ridiculously over-provisioned? I mean, unless you turn the chiller on with the computer off, you shouldn't freeze up anyway, right?

Like you said, pants on the head, basically.
 
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 5:22 pm

Basically all of the closed loop systems you see spruiked (e.g. the Asetek AIO units) are running a corrosion inhibitor, like your car will, because they're using mixed metals - this may be what you're thinking of, Redocbew? One of the glycols, usually.

My own custom loop is running straight distilled water.

More exotic cooling setups will be running more exotic fluids. It won't be possible to say with certainty what fluid was being used at your building without knowing more about the system.
 
Yan
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 6:16 pm

Glorious wrote:
EDIT: Like, if they shut the BUILDING down, it was probably a large like car-size commercial unit, potentially on the roof but definitely right near that buildling, that had a leak.

It's the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They have about 12 floors in a building. It's just an office building; I'm sure it's nothing industrial. They could conceivably run scientific programs, although I doubt the servers would be in an office building.

All the actual operations happen where there really are fisheries and oceans, not in downtown Ottawa. :-)
 
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 8:42 pm

I run distilled with a coil and some biocide in my desktop. The water cooling loops at work (around 10 MW of cooling for the larger building) are water with some basic treatments to keep scale and whatnot out of the pipes.

So yeah - generally just water unless you're going sub-ambient. Even the internal loops in the smaller systems are just water with glycol or something similar.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:17 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
Glorious wrote:
Commercial/industrial air conditioning often uses ammonia as a refrigerant. That might be what that was.

My sister and her husband own an ice business. You know, the 5lb bags of cubes you get at the corner store. Their entire cooling cycle is built on pure anhydrous ammonia. They run a full-on disaster drill with the local FD every year.
Ammonia is that one substance that exchanges heat better than water. But is not used in residential cooling for just that reason. I remember being so intrigued by the refrigerator in a trailer back in the 1970's that used a propane flame as a heat source to run the absorption cycle ammonia-water refrigerator.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:20 pm

Shobai wrote:
Basically all of the closed loop systems you see spruiked (e.g. the Asetek AIO units) are running a corrosion inhibitor, like your car will, because they're using mixed metals - this may be what you're thinking of, Redocbew? One of the glycols, usually.

My own custom loop is running straight distilled water.

More exotic cooling setups will be running more exotic fluids. It won't be possible to say with certainty what fluid was being used at your building without knowing more about the system.
My lab chiller uses a freon for the refrigerant and recirculates propylene glycol as the cooling fluid to instruments.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:29 pm

Mr Bill wrote:
Ammonia is that one substance that exchanges heat better than water. But is not used in residential cooling for just that reason. I remember being so intrigued by the refrigerator in a trailer back in the 1970's that used a propane flame as a heat source to run the absorption cycle ammonia-water refrigerator.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges here. Water cooling loops generally keep water in its liquid form, where you're relying solely on the heat capacity of the liquid phase to move the heat around. Ammonia-based cooling systems use a compressor and rely on the latent heat of vaporization (i.e. phase change) of the ammonia. Very different things.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:50 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
Glorious wrote:
Commercial/industrial air conditioning often uses ammonia as a refrigerant. That might be what that was.

My sister and her husband own an ice business. You know, the 5lb bags of cubes you get at the corner store. Their entire cooling cycle is built on pure anhydrous ammonia. They run a full-on disaster drill with the local FD every year.


Kidd mine has a big ammonia cooler for AC for the UG. Mainly just a back up for the ice stope though.

But liquid SO2, now there's a cool refrigerant.

Hard to beat water for cooling though.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 11:01 pm

There is also that fluid they use for immersion cooling
Can't look it up right now but 3m makes some im sure someone else will know about it
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Wed Aug 08, 2018 11:33 pm

Novec.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Thu Aug 09, 2018 12:26 am

just brew it! wrote:
Mr Bill wrote:
Ammonia is that one substance that exchanges heat better than water. But is not used in residential cooling for just that reason. I remember being so intrigued by the refrigerator in a trailer back in the 1970's that used a propane flame as a heat source to run the absorption cycle ammonia-water refrigerator.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges here. Water cooling loops generally keep water in its liquid form, where you're relying solely on the heat capacity of the liquid phase to move the heat around. Ammonia-based cooling systems use a compressor and rely on the latent heat of vaporization (i.e. phase change) of the ammonia. Very different things.
The standard molar entropy of water is ~70 versus ~193 for ammonia. From wikipedia... properties of water
Water has a very high specific heat capacity of 4.1814 J/(g·K) at 25 °C – the second highest among all the heteroatomic species (after ammonia), as well as a high heat of vaporization (40.65 kJ/mol or 2257 kJ/kg at the normal boiling point), both of which are a result of the extensive hydrogen bonding between its molecules. These two unusual properties allow water to moderate Earth's climate by buffering large fluctuations in temperature. Most of the additional energy stored in the climate system since 1970 has accumulated in the oceans.[26]

The specific enthalpy of fusion (more commonly known as latent heat) of water is 333.55 kJ/kg at 0 °C: the same amount of energy is required to melt ice as to warm ice from −160 °C up to its melting point or to heat the same amount of water by about 80 °C. Of common substances, only that of ammonia is higher. This property confers resistance to melting on the ice of glaciers and drift ice. Before and since the advent of mechanical refrigeration, ice was and still is in common use for retarding food spoilage.

The specific heat capacity of ice at −10 °C is 2.03 J/(g·K)[27] and the heat capacity of steam at 100 °C is 2.08 J/(g·K).[28]
Of course nobody in their right mind would use liquid ammonia as a heat exchange fluid in a cooling loop.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Thu Aug 09, 2018 5:17 am

Mr Bill wrote:
Of course nobody in their right mind would use liquid ammonia as a heat exchange fluid in a cooling loop.
Freon wasn't developed for commercial refrigeration until 1930. Up until that time, ammonia was the most commonly used refrigerant. It was still found in many heavy industrial systems for decades after that. Fast forward half a century to where we realized that chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer, and ammonia has made a bit of a comeback in industrial refrigeration. The thermal properties of ammonia are good for heat exchange and refrigeration. The big negative is toxicity - a small leak is much more hazardous than non-reactive Freon. Corrosion is also a concern.
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Re: What liquid is used for "water" cooling?

Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:24 am

DPete27 wrote:
Novec.

Specifically Novec Engineered Fluid 649.

3M uses "Novec" for all sorts of fluids so unless you know exactly which one you want you might end up buying contact cleaner or degreaser instead of the immersion coolant.

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