Project: DLCool - thermal nanofluids for direct liquid cooling

Life Sciences Insitute

This project is developing next-generation cooling fluids that could make data centres and high-performance computing far more energy-efficient, cutting both power use and emissions.

Challenge Space

Enviroment Challenge

Prinicipal Investigator(s) and team names

Dr Darren Fayne (DCU PI), Dr Lorna Fitzsimons (co-PI), Dr Medet Inkarbekov

Collaborating Institutions

HT Materials Science; Exergyn

Funding support

Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund, Call 7 (2025)

Project start date

2025

End date

Current

Problem

High-energy computing and industrial systems generate heat that has to be removed, and removing it accounts for a substantial share of the energy such facilities consume. In Ireland the question is not academic: data centre electricity demand has become a significant factor in national consumption and grid planning.

Conventional air cooling is inefficient at the densities modern equipment reaches, so the environmental cost of computation is rising faster than the computation itself.

Background

Direct liquid cooling carries heat away far more effectively than air, and its performance can be improved further by suspending nanoparticles in the working fluid, which raises thermal conductivity.

The difficulty is that such suspensions must stay stable and must not become too viscous to pump, and the trade-off between these properties is not well understood at the molecular level. DLCool is a consortium project funded through the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund, with DCU working alongside industrial partners, and is led at DCU jointly with Dr Lorna Fitzsimons.

Solution

The DCU contribution is computational: simulating how these fluids behave at the molecular scale in order to understand and predict heat transfer, particle stability and flow properties, so that formulations can be directed by modelling rather than arrived at by trial and error. The purpose of the project is environmental: reducing the energy, and therefore the emissions, required to keep high-density computing running.