Here’s an ironic twist of physics to ponder. There are virtually tens of millions of applications that require enormous amounts of energy to produce heat, while at the very same time other applications require enormous amounts of energy but produce unwanted heat as an industrial byproduct. As a simple example, let’s consider a car engine. We are told that the reason we put oil in the engine is to reduce friction. To “lubricate” the moving parts. Yet in reality, what we are trying to do is reduce the “effects” of friction, which in every instance is heat energy. Allow the moving parts to become too hot and they will expand, grind against each other, and ultimately fail. Consequently the car engine has to spend a portion of its very expensive fuel energy for running a radiator fan and a water pump to keep the temperatures down.
If you are trying to produce heat, you have to use up some form of energy, whether chemical or mechanical. But even if your goal is to eliminate heat, you have to use up energy, and this is where Angstrom Microsystems comes in. Angstrom has developed cooling systems for computer servers, server racks, data nodes, and server farms that far surpass the standard air cooling architecture generally seen. By lowering the working temperature of the computer servers, they can cluster more of them together, reduce the “footprint” of the server farm, and most importantly, cut the amount of energy used by the center, by a factor of 30 percent.
Angstrom, which trades under the symbol ANGS, is an engineering company, a computing company and an environmental company all in one. Their LiquiCool architecture for effective cooling of high power servers is flexible and fits the requirements of most data centers. While that’s great news, the real story is in the energy savings. Via provable data, Angstrom can demonstrate a 30-percent savings in electrical use by utilizing their power modules and their “liquicool” heat reducing architecture.
Where does the energy savings come from? The biggest expense a server cluster farm generally has is “air conditioning” costs as they try and keep their cluster room cool. Computers that get hot will indeed fail, and air conditioning is the standard way of addressing the problem. Unfortunately it’s not terribly efficient, and – just as bad – it creates noise, limits the areas you can place your servers, and costs a lot. Angstrom’s approach virtually eliminates the need for an air conditioned cluster room.
Angtrom’s approach works like this:
Heat exchangers convert gas that is created by the computer cooling process back into a liquid form. The liquid absorbs heat from the exchangers placed around the servers, and turns into a gas. Gas rises through pipes to a location above the computers, usually on the roof, where it is cooled by:
• Air blowing across the pipes
• Water flowing across the pipes
• Water evaporating on the pipes
The gas condenses back into a liquid and falls back down the tubing into the heat exchangers again, only to have the process repeat over and over. Unlike any other liquid cooling product, Angstrom LiquiCool provides a variety of heat exchanger technologies that fit virtually any specific data center requirements.
The installation of an Angstrom Liquicool system can pay for itself in less than two years via the reduction of energy use and its ability to allow a denser cluster of servers under one roof. For the data center, this is something that simply cannot be ignored, and it’s the reason Angstrom has seen strong demand for its systems.
If this technology was all Angstrom provided, it would make for an interesting investment vehicle to consider. But this is just one of the several services ANGS provides, and is one of the reasons that Angstrom should be on your investing radar screen.
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