"All told, a mid-sized data center consumes around 300,000 gallons of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 U.S. households, says Shehabi of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Their direct, on-site consumption ranks data centers among the top 10 water users in America's industrial and commercial sectors."
This is not looking good at all:
Maybe that's why Microsoft is sinking some in the plentiful (most of Earth's surface) salt waters.
That makes a lot of sense. Without phase change, circulating water to absorb heat generally sucks at 1 BTU per pound per degree F. Since 1W is 3.4 BTUH, that translates into a humongous amount of water circulation for a typical data center.
Seems nuts. Heat pipes evaporate water to shift heat, then condense it at the other end of the pipe to get rid of the heat.
Put a compressor somewhere along that pipe and you can force the water vapour to condense at a much higher temperature than you used to evaporate it.
It's a closed system, but it does use more electricity than you'd use if you simply let the water evaporate.
The chemistry of material compatibility and thermodynamic considerations really complicate things, but it's not anything that can't be handled:
This isn't any kind of complicated exposition - it's heat transfer fluids for dummies.
If you put water in a closed system it needs to be de-ionised. Adding a bit of glycol makes sense if can get cold and you don't want it to freeze.
And need to scrape off the dissolved solids from time to time. It is pretty idiotic. Closed systems are better behaved, but they aren't dirt cheap,
They're trying to summarize the highlights of all the various cooling liquids in 500 words or less.
That's just it. They want to keep the buy-in costs low, and play down the lifecycle costs of maintenance and replacement.
Those towers are where the legionella forms up too- so much so workers have to wear hazmat suits to get near it.
Hey- let's put the building fresh air exchange intake close by too.
But they don't seem to have any grasp of the fundamentals.
Keep all the services close together - makes access for maintenance so much easier.
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