Dielectric Immersion Cooling Fluids
Lubricants are not only there to keep processes running smoothly, they can also provide cooling. FUCHS takes advantage of this fact to develop products for new business areas and make them future-proof. The specially developed fluids have the aim of regulating high temperatures, such as those found in the drive systems of electric vehicles or in large data centers. A specially designed process was developed for this purpose, in which entire modules are immersed in cooling fluids.
The era of e-mobility entails numerous challenges and opportunities. The desire for fast charging at a speed comparable to the refuelling of a combustion car is as old as e-mobility itself. Major advances in battery chemistry enable very high charging rates of more than 5C. The same applies to data centers, which are consuming more and more energy, which is additionally promoted by the significantly higher performance of the installed chips and the improved heat dissipation required as a result.
However, this results in a very high heat output due to power loss which needs to be dissipated from the battery pack of the electric vehicle, just as from the server components of high-performance data centers. At the same time, battery safety is increasingly becoming the focus of the further development of electrified drives. The desired improvement in the energy density of the lithium-ion battery packs leads to increasingly higher demands on the pack design.
In particular, thermal management during operation and safety in the event of accidents or spontaneous cell failure are essential. Furthermore, an efficient cooling also enhances the lifetime of the battery cells as well as for data centers. Immersion cooling systems, in which the battery cells are directly immersed by a dielectric fluid, can act on these requirements. The highest efficiency and cooling capability are to be expected with direct immersion cooling by a dielectric fluid.
Therefore FUCHS has set itself the goal of developing affordable, high-performance, and safe liquids and also offering options for sustainable solutions.
Fields of application
Thermal fluids for e-mobility
In future, electric vehicles will need to charge much faster. The number of data centers is also on the rise. Energy requirements are therefore increasing everywhere, so more cooling is also needed. FUCHS offers a solution here in the form of electric fluids for immersion cooling.
When compared with the conventional systems currently used, immersion cooling offers significant benefits for our customers. When electric cars are charged, up to 350 kilowatts flow through the cable. When electric trucks hit the road in the future, they will draw considerably more power, generating a lot of heat. Conventional cooling processes quickly reach their limits here. However, our immersion cooling was developed specifically for this kind of high-performance application.
With immersion cooling, the entire battery pack is actually submerged in the thermal fluid. This means that the fluid flows directly around all of the battery cells, which then dissipate their heat outward evenly. We design the entire system of heat management in such a way that the ideal balance is established between safety, effectiveness, and cost efficiency.
Fully charged in just ten minutes? That's how it will be in the future.
"Batteries in electric cars should always be kept at between 20°C and 40°C. Effective cooling is therefore extremely important in securing fast charging times and a long range."
- Thomas Kraft, Business Development Manager E-Mobility at FUCHS SE
Thermal fluids for data centers
Today's data centers require a very large amount of energy to function. In the future, this situation will even intensify as the performance of the chips will increase, which will also automatically be accompanied by an increasing demand for heat dissipation.
Comparing the heat capacities of air and thermal fluids, the thermal fluids perform much better and are therefore able to dissipate the heat generated at the components much more effectively. When we talk about immersion cooling, we mean a process in which the electrical components are immersed in a non-conductive liquid. This allows the liquid to flow directly around the components to be cooled from all sides. This process ensures a significantly longer service life of the components, as they are constantly protected from dust, heat, or thermal overload.
Among the biggest advantages of this modern technology is the ability to drastically reduce energy consumption, which in turn means that costs can be cut, while servers can be placed much closer together within the data centers.
Read more on immersion cooling in data centers
According to a recent study by the Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability, the energy demands of data centers and servers in Germany alone rose to 16 billion kilowatt hours in 2020, a full seven percent increase from 2019. And the trend shows that these numbers will continue to rise in the future. A Polish subsidiary of FUCHS specializes in immersion cooling for data technology and, together with one of its customers and experts from a German subsidiary, has even been able to develop a coolant for cryptomining devices. This involves, for example, the generation of virtual currencies such as bitcoins, whose complex process requires vast amounts of energy.
The process of immersion cooling is still in its early stages, but holds enormous potential for future development, which is already in full swing. There are even initial approaches to using the excess heat generated in the future to heat rooms or water elsewhere instead, thereby taking a closer look at the sustainability factor. The idea has at least already been tackled by our experts at FUCHS.
"Immersion cooling can be an important part of the solution."
- David Baier, Head Of Global Product Management Industrial Oils at FUCHS SE
