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Liquid CO2 for high density cooling from Trox AITCS

Tony Chan | March 4, 2008 | 0 Comments

The same stuff that makes the bubbles in coca cola is now being deployed to cool high density data centre environments.

As Green Telecom reported earlier, Trox AITCS, a company founded by Trox TECHNIK, a world leader in industrial and commercial cooling systems, is bringing to Asia its high capacity cooling solution using liquid CO2. The company announced a major expansion into Asia, with a brand new office in Hong Kong’s Lippo Centre, and plans to significantly expand headcount across the region.

Read the full transcript of our interview with Trox AITCS managing director, David Leatherbarrow in our Extra section!

The company is targeting corporations and any organization with high density cooling requirements such as data centres and even dealing floors of major banks.

“The issue of increasing heat loads from electronic equipment is found across different industries,” said David Leatherbarrow, managing director of Trox AITCS and the brains behind the idea. “There are lots of people with major problems in cooling electronic equipment that they can’t deal with.”

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According to Leatherbarrow, the heat removing capacity of liquid CO2 and the company’s product design, which places the cooling system on the racks themselves instead of the environment of the room, offers unique advantages over conventional air and water-based cooling systems.

Liquid CO2 offers 7.2 times the cooling capacity of water, which allows the Trox system to be smaller and support higher densities, all the while being more energy efficient. “Our system compared to water systems and water and air systems, it’s about a third less energy, and it takes up less space and has 50% more capacity than other alternatives that are available,” he said.

Despite is breakthrough performance claims, the patented system is based on a simple concept.

“When you boil water, basically you take the heat and it turns it into a gas. What we do is we circulate CO2 on the same basis that we would circulate water,” Leatherbarrow said. “When it boils, it takes away heat from the computer. You supply all liquid and you end up discharging a mixture of gas and liquid but still at the same temperature and pressure because if you take the temperature from the steam from the kettle and the temperature of the water, it’s the same temperature, and it’s the same pressure.”

One major challenge for the deployment of liquid CO2 is that “in high concentrations, it stops you breathing,” Leatherbarrow continued. To rectify this issue, Trox has adopted tight controls over the installation and delivery process. “The type of people who are installing it on our behalf are either from the refrigeration industry, or from the petro chemical industry, so they are normally used to working at the higher level of integrity and we intend to carry on that way. We also do not allow anybody to do installation. The total turnkey contract must be with Trox AITCS, and we approve and select, and the installers work for us. What the clients get is a fully installed system”