- Uravu Tatooine converts data center waste heat into clean, usable water
- The liquid desiccant absorbs moisture and allows for continuous water recovery cycles.
- Cooling systems operate within acceptable temperature ranges for modern servers.
Growing computing demand continues to put pressure on all data centers, especially as cooling systems consume large amounts of power and water simultaneously.
A startup called Uravu has developed a cooling system that uses a liquid saltwater desiccant to extract water from hot air, which could turn data centers from water consumers to water producers.
Since data centers currently reject massive amounts of waste heat into the atmosphere, Uravu’s system captures that heat and puts it to work.
Article continues below.
How salt water and waste heat work together to create fresh water
The system, called Tatooine, uses a liquid desiccant to absorb moisture from hot air.
When that 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 room temperature plus four degrees, which is already cold 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 chiller entirely.
The salt solution then releases pure water into the desorber as vapor, with a vacuum pump reducing the pressure to allow evaporation at lower temperatures.
The cooling water can return to a temperature of between 27 and 32 degrees Celsius, which is within the range allowed by ASHRAE 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 viable solution,” said Swapnil Shrivastav, CEO and co-founder of Uravu.
“That allows users to keep energy use effectiveness (PUE) low, and you can also say that water use effectiveness (WUE) is negative because there is a surplus of water that can be supplied to communities.”
What 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 surplus pure distilled water per day.
That figure fluctuates depending on ambient humidity levels, but Shrivastav says the system generates at least five cubic meters of water on the lower end of the spectrum.
This water is pure enough for drinking or other industrial processes, and its energy consumption is one-fifth the power of an air-cooled chiller and half that of a water-cooled chiller.
Uravu already has 40 clients in the hospitality sector and supplies them with bottled water from a machine in its Bengaluru laboratories that produces five cubic meters of pure water a day.
The company has developed a 125-kilowatt unit for small deployments and pilots, and its next goal is a one-megawatt block that can be converted into a modular solution.
While the technology seems promising, generating 5 to 30 cubic meters of water per megawatt means that extracting 100 megawatts would require 100 of these units.
Additionally, the liquid desiccant system introduces salt water into a facility designed for dry air and electronics, which is not a trivial engineering challenge.
Still, for data centers in water-scarce regions where cooling accounts for a large portion of operating costs, a system that simultaneously cools and generates water deserves close attention.
The next 12 months of pilot deployments will determine whether this system lives up to expectations or remains a mirage in the desert.
Through Data center dynamics
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