- Uravu Tatooine converts data center waste heat into usable clean water
- Liquid desiccant absorbs moisture and enables continuous water recycling cycles
- Cooling systems operate within acceptable temperature ranges for modern servers
Increasing computing demand continues to strain any data center, especially as cooling systems use large amounts of energy and water simultaneously.
A startup called Uravu has developed a cooling system that uses a liquid salt water desiccant to extract water from hot air, potentially turning data centers from water consumers into water producers.
As data centers currently reject huge amounts of waste heat into the atmosphere, Uravus’ system captures this heat and puts it to work.
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How salt water and waste heat work together to create fresh water
The system, called Tatooine, uses a liquid desiccant to absorb moisture from warm air.
When the desiccant is heated using waste heat from the data center, it releases pure water vapor that can be condensed and collected.
The absorber operates at an ambient temperature of plus four degrees, which is already cool enough to replace a conventional cooling tower in many locations.
This liquid desiccant helps maintain a very low temperature, meaning operators can potentially replace their chiller or dry cooler entirely.
The salty solution then releases clean water into the desorber as steam, with a vacuum pump lowering the pressure to allow evaporation at lower temperatures.
Cooling water can be returned at 27 to 32 degrees Celsius, which falls within the ASHRAE allowable range for operating servers.
The system uses waste heat that would otherwise be rejected, keeping energy costs lower than conventional cooling methods.
“It is quickly becoming an efficient and economically feasible solution,” said Swapnil Shrivastav, CEO and co-founder of Uravu.
“It allows users to keep Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) low, and you can also claim negative Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) because you have excess water that can be delivered to the communities.”
What do the numbers look like for a typical data center?
Uravu claims that for every megawatt of data center power, the system can generate up to 30 cubic meters of pure distilled surplus water per day.
That number fluctuates depending on ambient humidity levels, but Shrivastav says the system generates at least five cubic meters of water at the lower end of the spectrum.
This water is clean enough for drinking or for other industrial processes, and its power consumption is one fifth of the power of an air-cooled chiller and half of the power of a water-cooled chiller.
Uravu already has 40 customers in the hospitality sector supplying bottled water from a machine in the laboratory in Bangalore that produces five cubic meters of clean water per day.
The company has developed a 125-kilowatt unit for small deployments and pilots, and its next goal is a one-megawatt block that could become a modular solution.
Although the technology sounds promising, it means generating 5 to 30 cubic meters of water per megawatts to draw 100 megawatts will require 100 of these units.
The liquid desiccant system also introduces salt water into a facility designed for dry air and electronics, which is a non-trivial engineering challenge.
Still, for data centers in water-stressed areas where cooling accounts for a massive portion of operating costs, a system that simultaneously cools and creates water deserves serious attention.
The next 12 months of pilot deployments will determine whether this system lives up to the hype or remains a desert mirage.
Via Data center dynamics
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