NEC Cites 50% Power Reduction for Innovative Cooling Technology

NEC has developed an innovative, multi-stage cooling technology that enables data centers to reduce air conditioning power consumption by up to 50%.

NEC is leveraging phase change coolants, which are able to remove a large amount of heat from the system at the temperature point when they change from liquid to vapor. The company said its technology is able to substantially reduce the air conditioning load inside server rooms because the heat from devices is collected before dispersed and is transported directly to the outside of the server room. In the case of a server room in which power consumption per rack is 12kW, total air conditioning power consumption (i.e. power consumed by fans and cooling machines) can be reduced by as much as 50%. Recent tests conducted at an NEC facility with 10 servers demonstrated that approximately 50% of the heat exhausted from the back of a rack was transported to the outside of the server room.

NEC has also developed a technology used to distribute and efficiently circulate coolant through each level of a multi-stage rack based on the amount of heat generated. The system uses an environmentally friendly coolant with an ozone depletion potential (ODP) of zero and a global warming potential of less than one half of conventional products such as HFCs, thus providing an ideal balance between high-efficiency cooling and low environmental impact.

http://www.nec.com