Enhancing data centre energy efficiency and reliability through hybrid cooling: A topology-optimized integrated cold plate approach

As global data generation and communication demands continue to grow, data centres have become major contributors to electricity consumption and carbon emissions, making efficient thermal management crucial for sustainability. To enhance energy efficiency, reliability, and fault tolerance in high-power data centres, this study presents a topology-optimized hybrid integrated cold plate (ICP) that synergistically combines liquid and air cooling within a monolithic, additively manufactured structure. The hybrid ICP is engineered to improve thermal performance, reduce operational risks, and provide inherent fault-tolerant capability. Its performance was validated through numerical simulations, laboratory experiments, and full-scale deployment in a data-centre testbed. Results show that the ICP maintains base temperatures around 52.5 °C at an optimal coolant flow rate of 1.25–1.5 L/(min·kW), ensuring thermal safety while minimizing energy use. Under an air-cooling-only operating mode, the ICP can sustain up to 67 % of the thermal design power while keeping the CPU core temperature below 85 °C, demonstrating strong operational resilience. Compared with commercial cold plates, the hybrid ICP lowers core temperatures by approximately 4-6°C under the same pumping power and reduces pumping power by about 50 % at the same core temperature. This improvement translates to a reduction of IT power consumption by up to 3.7 %, resulting in a PUE improvement from 1.38 to 1.23. The integration of advanced thermal design, additive manufacturing, and comprehensive multi-level validation highlights the scalability and practicality of the hybrid ICP, offering a robust, energy-efficient, and reliable solution for next-generation high-density data centres.