Data Furnace

Heat recycling from high performance computers is gaining more attention in recent years with the exponential increase in their usage. The heat generated by their computer boards can potentially be retrieved to replace standard water heating systems while simultaneously performing profitable or useful computations, ultimately eliminating heating costs. Localized liquid cooling is conventionally used to cool down high performance computers, and consists in extracting heat exclusively from the Computer Processing Unit of the computer boards. Due to the localized aspect of this cooling method, it is unable to extract heat from the entire board and thus can physically not attain high extraction efficiencies compared to standard water heaters. Alternatively, non conductive immersion cooling can be utilized for this application to produce competitive results. This project primarily focused on the design and set up of a cooling system that utilized mineral oil as the working fluid. Antminer S9 computer boards were immersed inside an insulated styrofoam box filled with circulating mineral oil. The system is connected to a heat exchanger which transfers heat to a water loop. Hot water circulates through an insulated water tank and can be manually redirected to a liquid to air radiator for safety purposes. Each loop has been instrumented with a flowmeter, a gate valve, and 2 thermocouples at the inlet and outlet of the liquid to liquid heat exchanger. The system in its integrity is not only able to generate heat, which can be quantified by measuring the temperature change of the water tank, but also generate cryptocurrency profits, monitored online. This study presents the design of the piping system, the estimation of total value generated in terms of heat stored and cryptocurrency, and finally the steps taken towards optimizing the net profit after subtracting electric operation costs.