How balancing innovation, sustainability, and practical solutions can bring about thermal efficiency.
Lead Application Engineer
Having worked in Henkel’s Thermal Materials division over the past decade, with the past six years specifically focused on the data and telecom market segment, I primarily support the production of all thermal applications from the very beginning of a customer’s challenge right through to launching the product and scaling up production.
As I read the first issue of Uniquely Wired, I couldn’t help but spot a few themes cropping up consistently. Here are my thoughts on them.
Whether it’s covered in Uniquely Wired or the mainstream media, AI is the topic on everyone’s mind right now.
But let’s be clear: In terms of material applications, AI is overall a pretty similar application to what’s historically existed in the market.
What’s different is the volumes and speeds these applications require. There are more applications that need thermal materials, they need them faster, and time-to-respond to the market is significantly shorter now.
In the first issue of Uniquely Wired, Google’s Andrés Lagar-Cavilla hit the nail on the head: The biggest impact of AI is that it’s raised the stakes.
Sure, there are higher power- and heat-loads that need to be dissipated, and there are more devices at those higher loads to drive AI systems, but by and large, it hasn’t changed the technical performance requirements of thermal materials. Those requirements are just accelerating at a faster exponential scale.
What this means for us at Henkel is that we have to be more agile in the way we work and in terms of product development. For example, we might have to develop a short-term solution that’ll get you there for 18 months while we develop a more robust and higher-performance product for the long-term. This requires deep collaboration, both internally and externally, to stay ahead of rapidly evolving requirements and innovations.
That said, one area that has come into the spotlight because of AI is liquid cooling. Again, this is a trend that we’ve seen before, but now it’s gaining more traction. It might be that AI drives the first widely adopted or applied liquid cooling systems in the industry.
So far, the implementation of liquid cooling systems has been more niche or on a smaller scale. That’s because the data center infrastructure isn’t yet there to accommodate these systems.
It’s a bit like what’s happening in the electric vehicle (EV) market right now. While major urban areas have well-developed networks, outside these regions the charging infrastructure is less available or accessible.
Liquid cooling faces similar challenges. It will be big, but when and where is that going to happen? For me, it’s a question of scale and investment. It’s coming, but it’s just taking a little more time and a little bit more technology development to enable everything to work properly.
Another topic that came up a lot in Issue #1 of Uniquely Wired was sustainability.
Blake Wageman
Here, the biggest thing we discuss with our customers is having more efficient thermal interface materials (TIM). It’s essentially a direct energy savings in terms of energy consumption for cooling. The way we see it, the more innovation we can bring with our TIM products to allow companies keep their current designs in place and dissipate that heat more effectively, the less energy they use and pay for.
In particular, micro TIM—a coating we apply to heat sinks in data centers—improves thermal efficiency and reduces energy consumption by enhancing the interface between the heat sink and the pluggable optical module. In fact, it can actually lower the operating temperature of each individual pluggable module between 1-7°C depending on the power level of the module. (5-7°C temperature decrease at 30W when compared to metal to metal)
If you expand that to an entire server room or data center, the impact can be huge in reducing the total amount of convective cooling. Efficient thermal solutions don’t just improve performance, they cut costs and emissions, making sustainability an integral part of good thermal management.
Finally, there is a strong theme of collaboration throughout Uniquely Wired. To me, that’s probably the most important thing.
At Henkel, the value we try to bring to our customers is as a total solutions provider. That means starting with what’s going wrong. We’re not focused on specific products; we’re focused on what the customer needs. Only then can we understand what the real issue is and how we can help them with that.
Because more often than not, in the thermal management world the answer is “it depends.” The best product or solution completely depends on the customer’s unique scenario. So, above everything else, finding this answer requires strong collaboration between us and our data and telecom customers.
Discover how the best mind in data and telecom are responding to the AI hype and innovating for tomorrow.
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