CASTROL

The facility serves as both a research and development centre and a demonstration site where customers can witness immersion cooling in action. This hands-on approach helps Castrol to address concerns about the new technology.

“What also makes us a leader is the fact that we’re already quite active in cooling”

Sung explains: “Not a lot of companies have a facility like this. It really sets us apart from our competitors because we can do the co-engineering and joint development with all these strategic partners and customers.”

The facility is also designed to support the company’s co-engineering philosophy. Chris adds: “We’re not a company that makes a fluid, gives it to someone who’s going to use it, and says ‘let us know how it works.’ We very much like to co-engineer. That’s always been part of Castrol’s DNA. We’ve done that historically with car manufacturers and now with data centre companies and server manufacturers.”

THERMAL MANAGEMENT DIRECTOR FOR EMEA, CASTROL

identify potential issues before they affect customer deployments.

Austin explains how partners like Unicom are a critical part of this validation process: “Validation is critical because we are designing and selling fully warranted, certified solutions. These have to work for years. You can’t just take individual building blocks, put them together and assume they’re going to work.”

Nick adds: “As new technologies come along, it’s really important to find partners that you can collaborate with, to get access to the latest and greatest equipment.

“Co-engineering means we can quantify and qualify our fluids with the latest and greatest equipment, but also work together to find out really in depth about how it’s working, why it’s working, or maybe why it doesn’t work.”

Moving beyond energy efficiency While energy efficiency is a primary driver for immersion cooling adoption, the technology is also able to offer additional benefits that align with broader environmental goals in the data centre industry.

This collaborative approach to product development enables Castrol to refine its fluids based on real-world testing and feedback. It means that the company can

141

CASTROL

WATCH NOW

The title of the video will be placed here

“By reducing heat rejection, it’s almost what’s termed as free cooling,” Stephen explains. “Because you have the immersion environment, all the heat is being taken away by the dielectric fluids, and then you just need to cool down the dielectric fluids with a cooling loop.

“Additionally, because of the high temperatures of operating, you don’t need to do any kind of refrigeration activity, you don’t need to use any water to accelerate the cooling process. This means you dramatically decrease the amount of energy you use, both from a cooling side, but also now your servers don’t have fans in them anymore. So even on the IT side, you’re saving a lot of power.” Traditional cooling methods often require substantial amounts of water for evaporative cooling. By reducing water consumption, Castrol hopes to address a growing concern for data centre operators, particularly in regions where water scarcity is an issue.

“Liquid cooling, specifically immersion cooling, has a benefit of energy saving up to 30% and water consumption reduction of about 80%,” Sung quantifies, based on the company’s research. “So, in the long run, it adds a reduction of the total cost of ownership for data centre owners.”

Beyond operational efficiency, Castrol is also considering the entire lifecycle of its cooling fluids. Chris explains: “At Castrol, we’ve got a circularity strategy where we can collect our fluids at the end of their lifecycle and reprocess them into fresh fluids, making that a more sustainable solution.”

142