OREANDA-NEWS. November 08, 2011. Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the development of cooling technology that employs waste heat generated by CPUs to produce chilled water that can be used to cool server rooms.

Producing water of a temperature low enough for use in cooling factory equipment requires a substantial amount of energy. Currently, water is normally chilled using electricity, boilers or other sources of thermal energy, but now there are new attempts to employ heat, including that from high temperature waste water, as an energy source. Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a technology that can chill water from relatively low-temperature sources that have not been usable in the past. At 55°C, water produced from water-cooled type CPUs is of a relatively low temperature, which fluctuates depending on load. However, it is possible to continuously produce chilled water even from this waste water.

This technology offers the ability to use a CPU's waste heat to cool a datacenter, which had previously been impossible, and could save about 20% of the power used to air condition datacenters, which accounts for approximately 40% of all power used by datacenters. For a single server rack, which consumes up to 12,000 kWh per year, this is equivalent to the volume of CO2 cut by 360 cedar trees.

Details of this technology were presented at the 2011 International Conference on Power and Energy Engineering, opened from October 28, 2011, in Shanghai.