Open Access

ARTICLE

Thermal Design Enhancement of a Single Phase Immersion Cooling System for Data Servers

Ali Anari Momenabadi¹, Ali Ahmadpour¹, Mohammad Reza Hajmohammadi¹, Giulio Lorenzini^2,*
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnique), Tehran, Iran
2 Department of Industrial Systems and Technologies Engineering, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 181/A, Parma, Italy
* Corresponding Author: Giulio Lorenzini. Email:

Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer https://doi.org/10.32604/fhmt.2026.085619

Received 14 May 2026; Accepted 15 September 2026; Published online 22 September 2026

Abstract

In this study, the thermal and hydraulic performance of a single-phase immersion cooling system for data servers was numerically investigated using three-dimensional CFD simulations in ANSYS Fluent. The flow was assumed to be laminar, incompressible, and steady, with Reynolds numbers ranging from 644 to 1932. The numerical model was validated against both experimental measurements and published numerical results, demonstrating good agreement. The effects of inlet–outlet arrangement, flow guide plate geometry, and Al₂O₃ nanofluid on the cooling performance were systematically investigated, and the optimized flow arrangement and flow guide plate were further evaluated in a dual-server configuration. Compared with the baseline T-type flow arrangement, the optimized inlet–outlet configuration produced only a modest improvement in thermal performance while slightly reducing the pressure drop. The optimized convex flow guide plate reduced the server case temperature by 10% with only a minor increase in pressure drop, whereas the addition of 2 wt.% Al₂O₃ nanoparticles to FC-40 further reduced the case temperature by 11.9%, yielding a thermal performance factor (TPF, indicating the balance between heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop penalty) of 1.11. For the dual-server configuration, the optimized flow arrangement and flow guide plates reduced the case temperatures of the first and second servers by 10% and 0.6%, respectively. These results demonstrate that combining geometric optimization with nanofluid enhancement provides an effective strategy for improving the thermal performance of single-phase immersion cooling systems for data servers.

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Keywords

CFD; heat sink; single-phase immersion cooling; data center cooling; nanofluid

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