IT Cooling Loop (TCS)
Data Center
The IT cooling loop, known in data centre practice as the Technology Cooling System, removes waste heat where it is produced: directly at the processor. It runs as a closed secondary loop, hydraulically separated from the facility loop by a coolant distribution unit. From there the water-glycol mixture travels through row and rack manifolds to the cold plates inside the servers, picks up the dissipated power and returns to the heat exchanger. Because this liquid circulates a few millimetres away from live electronics, joint integrity, drip-free disconnection under pressure and a corrosion-safe material pairing determine the uptime of entire rack rows.
The subcategories of this branch describe what each component does inside the loop; the product range for the IT layer is currently being built up and is not yet listed here. Hose assemblies, couplings and shut-off valves can already be made up from our existing fluid power programme. One material rule applies throughout the closed water-glycol loop: stainless steel and engineering plastics are uncritical, copper alloys only within a single alloy family, galvanised steel and aluminium have no place in this circuit.
Categories
Materials in the closed water-glycol loop of the IT layer
| Material | Use in the IT loop | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Stainless steel | unrestricted | resistant to water-glycol, releases no particles into the loop |
| PVDF, PP, PE | unrestricted | chemically resistant, non-conductive, forms no galvanic cell |
| PTFE, POM, PVC | unrestricted | suitable for sealing and sliding faces as well as valve components |
| Brass, gunmetal, bronze, copper | single alloy family only | mixed with less noble metals the loop develops galvanic corrosion |
| Galvanised steel | do not use | the zinc layer sheds and the particles block cold plate channels |
| Aluminium | do not use | least noble material in the loop, corrodes first against copper parts |
- Racks with direct-to-chip cooling where air can no longer carry away the dissipated power
- High performance computing and AI training clusters running at sustained load
- Colocation floors where individual rows are converted to liquid cooling
- Retrofitting air-cooled legacy rows through heat exchangers in the rack door
- Test floors and laboratory rigs where server hardware is measured under load