Liquid Cooling

Cold Plates Heat Exchangers Cooling Systems

Liquid cooling, also known as cooling with liquid, is a very effective way to remove high heat loads from components. Excessive heat can compromise the reliability of a system, and engineers usually turn to liquid cooling when air cooling is no longer providing enough heat removal. Two types of liquid cooling are contact cooling and cabinet cooling.

A liquid cooling loop for contact cooling typically consists of a cold plate, pump, heat exchanger, and pipes or hoses. Heat generated by a component is transferred from the component to the thermally conductive cold plate, and then to the liquid coolant that flows through the cold plate. The heated coolant is then pumped through the heat exchanger, where heat is moved from the coolant to either the ambient air, or, in the case of a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger, to another liquid. The cooled liquid then flows through the pipes or hoses back to the cold plate, completing the liquid cooling loop. Instead of a heat exchanger, a recirculating chiller, a liquid cooling system, or facility water may be used to provide cool liquid to the process.

With cabinet cooling the air within the cabinet is cooled by flowing cold liquid through the heat exchanger and distributing the air within the cabinet via the heat exchanger's fan. As with contact cooling, cabinet cooling may receive the cold liquid from facility water, a recirculating chiller, or another heat exchanger.

Liquid cooling has two primary benefits over air cooling. One benefit is higher performance, since the fluids most commonly used for liquid cooling have much higher thermal conductivity than air. A second benefit is that liquid cooling is often much quieter and requires less space than air cooling. Since less air flow is needed, electronics can be packed in more tightly.

Liquid Cooling Technologies

Lytron designs and manufactures all the thermal components in a liquid cooling loop, providing Total Thermal Solutions. Lytron's liquid cooling products include both standard and custom cold plates, cooling systems, and heat exchangers. Various fluids can be used with the liquid cooling products, including water, deionized water, ethylene glycol, oil, polyalphaolefin, and dielectric fluids. (Please contact Lytron to discuss using other fluids.)

Liquid Cooling Industry Applications

Liquid cooling is used to cool high power electronic devices within many industries, including medical, military and aerospace, laser, semiconductor, transportation, printing, and more. (Lytron's liquid cooling applications are outlined within Standard Products.)

Liquid Cooling with Lytron

Standard Liquid Cooling Products

Lytron’s standard products include cold plates, recirculating chillers, cooling systems, and heat exchangers. Standard products are ideal for prototyping and end-user applications. Use the product selector tools on our web site for assistance in selecting the correct liquid cooling product, or call one of our applications engineers for sizing help.

Custom Engineered Solutions

Last year we shipped over 600 different custom part numbers to OEMs worldwide! With the widest range of cold plate, cooling system, and heat exchanger technologies, and the engineering expertise to customize them to your requirements, Lytron is your one-stop source for all the thermal management components in your liquid cooling loop. We can also build cooling sub-assemblies, making it easier for you to integrate the cooling system into your product.

Innovative Product Development

Innovation is key at Lytron. Our responsiveness to challenging customer thermal management requirements means that we are always developing new products and pushing the limits of liquid cooling.

Engineering expertise for custom liquid cooling solutions

Lytron’s thermal management and liquid cooling expertise is unrivaled. Our design engineers utilize an extensive toolbox of specialized software including thermal modeling software, analytical tools, solid modeling, and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) to design high performance and cost-effective solutions to your heat transfer challenges.

We combine these software tools with an empirical database containing 45 years of data and a design philosophy that fully integrates engineering and manufacturing. This multi-faceted approach enables us to customize performance, physical envelope, material selection, inlet/outlet configuration, and additional options for any liquid cooling application.

We can also review and re-design your existing cooling loop to improve performance and reduce its size and cost. This frequently saves OEMs substantial money and valuable system real estate.

Our engineering laboratory can test any part that we make, to validate designs or test finished product. Our well-equipped, in-house test facility includes wind tunnels (up to 21k cfm), flow stations, data acquisition stations, refrigeration test equipment, particle counters, microstructure analysis system, and various flow, temperature and pressure instruments. Complete shock and vibration testing and agency approvals are available on most of our components.

Flexible Manufacturing 

Our 115,000 square foot facility is designed to be flexible and agile for maximum throughput of a large number of customized parts for liquid cooling. Our lean manufacturing principles, vertical integration, and cellular organizational structure make this possible.

All performance-critical processes, such as fin-forming, machining, vacuum brazing, tube bending, etc. are carried out in-house—this way we can guarantee that our product will perform as predicted. Equally important, our production facility and QC department are housed in the same facility as our designers and our engineering test laboratory. This ensures that we maintain control from initial concept to completion, so you can be sure that all products are built exactly as the engineer intended.

Our manufacturing strategy focuses on optimizing manufacturing processes and continuous improvement through employee involvement. Our heavy investment in capital equipment for our production lines has enabled us to increase production capacity, reduce costs and lead times, and make better products, faster. Our self-managed work cells take full responsibility for product quality, on-time delivery, and cost reduction efforts.

Our in-house manufacturing capabilities include:

• CNC machining, EDM, CNC tube bending, and high-speed fin making presses.
• Advanced metal joining techniques, such as torch brazing, TIG, MIG and orbital welding.
• For our vacuum-brazed products, our equipment includes an environmentally-controlled room, two vacuum furnaces, and a heat treat furnace.
• Systems assembly lines, including several dedicated to custom liquid cooling products.
• A well-equipped QC lab includes coordinate measuring equipment, hardness testing, an optical comparator and photo-micrograph capabilities.

Liquid Cooling Links

Lytron offers a number of resources to help you find the right liquid cooling technology for your application. Lytron's interactive Liquid Cooling Product Selectors allow you to enter your specifications to receive a list of recommended technologies, obtain a quote and performance data, and more. Lytron's liquid cooling application notes as well as an online form to Ask An Engineer are also available. Below are some additional liquid cooling references:

Liquid Cooling Thermal Primer 
Designing a Liquid Cooling Loop for High-Performance Systems 
Datacom Liquid Cooling Guidelines
Liquid Cooling Events 
Cooling Chronicle E-Newsletter