Castrol Immerses Itself Deeper Into Liquid Cooling With Researcher

Lubricants company Castrol has hooked up with the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) to help develop next-generation immersion cooling fluids for datacenters.

The "liquid engineering" company said it's working with RISE to provide it with material science, fluid and thermal management knowledge for the state-of-the-art testbed and research facilities the Institute is said to have.

Partly, the company appears to see this as a way to further development the Castrol ON range of single-phase immersion cooling fluids, but also as an opportunity to speed-up adoption of immersion cooling among others involved in the project. Castrol is nowadays a subsidiary of oil and gas giant BP.

Immersion cooling, where servers and other IT equipment are typically submerged in a special dielectric fluid that conducts heat but not electricity, has garnered more attention of late due to the increasing density of infrastructure in datacenters, and because newer processors and accelerators are consuming ever more power.

"Immersion cooling is a fast-developing sphere of innovation, spurred on by the global need to optimise the efficiency and energy usage of the world's most powerful datacenters," said BP's veep for Advanced Lubricants Products, Rebecca Yates.

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Castrol and RISE aim to step-up development of immersion coolants as well as develop science to address "challenges associated with the development of next-generation computing."

Just last year Castrol said it was planning to build its own development and test facilities for datacenter immersion cooling technology at its UK headquarters to support validation programs for products and customers.

The company also unveiled an agreement with cooling specialist Submer to increase adoption of immersion cooling, with the company aiming to combine its thermal management know-how with Submer's background in immersion cooling technology.

And what benefit does RISE see from Castrol joining its partner program? The institute's Director for Infrastructure and Cloud research & test Environment (ICE), Tor Björn Minde, said that it wants to excel in datacenter technologies by working with the tech industry.

"A partner program helps with dialogue and enables direct bi-lateral collaboration," he said. ®