Apheros: Metal foam for cooling data centers

2024: Product Announcement

At the end of August 2024, Apheros introduced a new metal foam that improves data center cooling, which accounts for almost 40% of total data center energy consumption. This technology can improve the heat exchange of cooling systems by 90%, thereby significantly reducing energy consumption.

Typically, a ventilation and air conditioning system is used to cool data center servers, but the capabilities of these systems are limited by energy consumption. As an alternative, more efficient methods of immersion and intra-type cooling have appeared on the market. In the first case, the servers are immersed in the dielectric fluid, and in the second case the cooling fluid circulates through the plates directly attached to the chip. Since both of these methods are based on the idea of heat exchange, with cooling system vendors using various technologies to increase chip surface area and facilitate heat transfer or dissipation when in contact with the cooling medium.

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Apheros

Apheros claims it can improve this approach with a new metal foam that has thousands of times the surface area of a conventional radiator. It is proposed that due to the increased thermal conductivity and porous structure, the foam can improve the heat exchange between the chips and the coolant by 90%. Ultra-high surface area metal foam is applied directly to the chip, and the coolant flows through it like a sponge, removing excess heat. Thanks to optimized foam heat exchange, all resource-intensive server components cool down faster, which means that systems require 10-20% less energy to cool down systems.

The cost of metal foam is less than 5% of the final cost of cooling systems and is unlikely to seriously increase the cost of modifying existing mechanisms.^[1]

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