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Topic: Novec 7000 Project [immersive evaporating cooling] (Read 26660 times)

legendary
Activity: 2162
Merit: 1401
Sorry for rebooting an old thread, but where can you buy this stuff,  I can't find any retailers in Canada, I haven't bothered to call 3M.

I have a total of about 5 liters worth between 7000/7100 (you can mix to get boiling teams between 35-60 C), if your interested.


btw here is my experimental rig in operation Wink  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5-BaH8_SAk
legendary
Activity: 3752
Merit: 2667
Evil beware: We have waffles!
Novec is strictly from 3M and it's distributors. Thought about it myself but damn it is expensive... If BTC was still at last years prices I'd go that route because it is a very slick almost self-regulating way of moving the heat to be removed elsewhere. At current BTCvalue no way right now.
legendary
Activity: 1600
Merit: 1014
call 3M.
newbie
Activity: 51
Merit: 0
Sorry for rebooting an old thread, but where can you buy this stuff,  I can't find any retailers in Canada, I haven't bothered to call 3M.
hero member
Activity: 672
Merit: 501
The 3M guy told us that we can mix them together since they use the same chimical elements. But you can't mix a 649 with any 7000 series liquid, it's not the same chemical
It's designed that way so you can select the perfect boiling point for what you want to cool.
But the guy wasn't an engineer, just a representant. Wait and see, i sendt a mail to the 3M staff, my Novec will be delivered within one week, so i have the time to verify if it's true or not Smiley I'll give you the truth from them Wink
If it's false, idk, i'll have some liters for something else, maybe my Zeus miners.

I have them for free because a friend of mine who owns a datacenter told them that he must do some tests of this kind of application and if it works like expected and not a pain to install and set up all the entire system, he will order a lot more of Novec for cooling his entire datacenter... so, yeah, they're interested as fuck for the deal Grin

Yay it was a long time ago but i made two vids for showing to my friends how it works.

You can see them here :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSKq2q9vkRY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEyfDD0jfKI

But now, it's really useless to let this shit running, Scrypt ASICS are dead my boys Grin
hero member
Activity: 702
Merit: 500
I first saw people doing the mineral oil thing in the early 90s.
I built a peltier water cooled system and fell in love with the idea of submersion cooling, but did not pursue it due to R&D cost, but now it seems for a large scale mining operation with the right backing this could be viable. Not the mineral oil per say but the 3M products.

Is anyone successfully  running a mining rig setup long term this way?
If so, what is the cost versus air?
Does the density provide the savings?

I could see this as being most useful for higher ambient mining. Say some home miner must shut down int he summer due to heat, and are limited anyway due to noise. Take a fish tank and mine year round?

Just curious...

there are several people doing immersion cooling for bitcoin mining rigs, and the most large scale to date (that i know of) is Allied Control in hong kong, most recently acquired by bitfury, but have previously done their own bitcoin mining and also are the guys who setup the asicminer immersion mining project.

hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 501
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905210.msg
I first saw people doing the mineral oil thing in the early 90s.
I built a peltier water cooled system and fell in love with the idea of submersion cooling, but did not pursue it due to R&D cost, but now it seems for a large scale mining operation with the right backing this could be viable. Not the mineral oil per say but the 3M products.

Is anyone successfully  running a mining rig setup long term this way?
If so, what is the cost versus air?
Does the density provide the savings?

I could see this as being most useful for higher ambient mining. Say some home miner must shut down int he summer due to heat, and are limited anyway due to noise. Take a fish tank and mine year round?

Just curious...
hero member
Activity: 702
Merit: 500

no, novec is their newer stuff and is the one they intend to use for liquid cooling.  there are multiple versions of novec that boil at different temps and you can mix them together to dial in almost any temp that you wish it to boil at.  there are even green novecs that are less polluting in the atmosphere.  fluorinert is their older product.. as used in cray supercomputers.  the one you linked to boils at 95 degrees which is a little too hot for most electronics, which wouldn't be the best solution for liquid cooling as we WANT it to boil, to utilise the two-phase nature of Novec.  if you didn't want it to boil you'd use a much cheaper liquid, like mineral oil!

the whole point of using Novec is that you decide what temperature you want your boards to run at, e.g., say 75 degrees...  and you dial in the right novec liquids to boil at that temperature... and then above the liquid you have coils to cool the vapour back into liquid form.  it rains back down into the novec tanks, and you carry the heat away in the coils to somewhere where you can use it or lose it.

full member
Activity: 193
Merit: 100
lol but seriously any updates on the rig?
legendary
Activity: 3234
Merit: 1220
LOL soy you dug up a thread from Aug 2013???
soy
legendary
Activity: 1428
Merit: 1013
Why not just build a pressure chamber since you have to condense the working fluid and use R134a as its a fraction of the cost?  Would only take 80-100PSI to hit a similar range.

I personally would be afraid of building a pressure vessel to contain the R134a. I suppose you could reuse something like a boiler or other already existing pressure vessels that would be sufficiently large. Immersive cooling with fluids that change phase at low temperatures brings all sorts of issues with safety.

It would be very interesting to see if any chips could scale in performance with temperature. Eventually, when chips are cheaper, I'd like to do such testing but sadly now is the time for that to potentially make economic sense. Use 1-10x more power to achieve 1-2x higher hash rate = more profit given the high fixed costs of the chips and general low power requirements. I imagine in the future when I can afford to blow up dozens/hundreds of chips in testing, the fixed costs of the chips will be a fraction of their expected energy consumption over their lifetime and thereby make the process of chilling them a waste of money.

Also the R134A available in auto parts stores 30 lb. cylinders for $199 probably contain lubricant and who knows if the lubricant is conductive.  Those 30 lb. cylinders are sold with a clear stipulation that the R134A contained is not to be use in electric vehicles.  There are research articles describing R134A cooling of electronic car propulsion electronics.
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
Are you guys all building this as a hobby, to build a large mine, or for professional use (job/company)?
We've been playing with the thought of doing some sort of internship program for a long time (we have done that in the past) but this needs a bit of planning as training and visas are involved. We certainly have plenty of development tanks sitting around and experiments to be conducted.
Just curious, this is not really related to Bitcoin.

I just figured that running 4kW+ of Neptunes (when the other five cubes arrive), expending energy to waste the heat generated by them and then paying to run a 3kW immersion heater at my house for our hot water is kinda stupid.

No reason I can't run the lowest coil in an evap. cooling system through a big tank of water 24/7 and then only waste the energy if the 60 degree 7100 vapor gets to the next coil up; at least then I get free hot water for running miners.

I would have it up and running by now if I wasn't so busy with work. Likewise I would love to get involved with what you guys are doing; but I just don't have the time.

u27
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 504
Have you looked into using the energy?

It heats our office in the winter for a month or two, but apart from that there is not a lot you can do in Hong Kong with the warm water (reuse in restaurant kitchen maybe, or warm some fish pond, if you'd have that in your vicinity).

We've been heating with the immersion system since the FPGA clusters.
http://www.allied-control.com/blog/heating-office-with-fpgas-and-servers

The DataTanks have an option for a heat exchanger for reuse as well.

With higher boiling points you could theoretically run reverse chillers, or even better produce electricity.

Look at the Panasonic developments for thermoelectric tubes, it's early but promising if true (820W/m3 with waste heat of 96°C water). I think the catch is that you also need cold water at the same time (river?) to create a high temp difference.

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20140416/346700/
http://panasonic.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/en110630-4/en110630-4.html

With a chip that likes it hot (some 28nm that was just released for instance), you could run it at 110-125C and create your electricity back. One can only dream I guess.


I heard many people are heating their house with the heat generated from miners.
How are you heating you office? Direct or via any heat exchanger?
Isn't it a very unhealthy or charged air ? Any heat concerns?
hero member
Activity: 489
Merit: 500
Immersionist
Are you guys all building this as a hobby, to build a large mine, or for professional use (job/company)?

We've been playing with the thought of doing some sort of internship program for a long time (we have done that in the past) but this needs a bit of planning as training and visas are involved. We certainly have plenty of development tanks sitting around and experiments to be conducted.

Just curious, this is not really related to Bitcoin.
hero member
Activity: 489
Merit: 500
Immersionist
Have you looked into using the energy?

It heats our office in the winter for a month or two, but apart from that there is not a lot you can do in Hong Kong with the warm water (reuse in restaurant kitchen maybe, or warm some fish pond, if you'd have that in your vicinity).

We've been heating with the immersion system since the FPGA clusters.
http://www.allied-control.com/blog/heating-office-with-fpgas-and-servers

The DataTanks have an option for a heat exchanger for reuse as well.

With higher boiling points you could theoretically run reverse chillers, or even better produce electricity.

Look at the Panasonic developments for thermoelectric tubes, it's early but promising if true (820W/m3 with waste heat of 96°C water). I think the catch is that you also need cold water at the same time (river?) to create a high temp difference.

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20140416/346700/
http://panasonic.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/en110630-4/en110630-4.html

With a chip that likes it hot (some 28nm that was just released for instance), you could run it at 110-125C and create your electricity back. One can only dream I guess.
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
All of them, including 649, 7000, 7100, 7200 and some older fluids on the smaller scale/tests (we use some of them for vapor phase soldering). Depends on the chip mainly.

It is my understanding that the efficiently recovered energy in the form of hot water is then wasted with your systems? For instance I recall seeing a couple of external cooling units at asicminer?

Have you looked into using the energy?
hero member
Activity: 489
Merit: 500
Immersionist
All of them, including 649, 7000, 7100, 7200 and some older fluids on the smaller scale/tests (we use some of them for vapor phase soldering). Depends on the chip mainly.
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
With 1% per month there is definitely something wrong with the design of the system, especially for Bitcoin mining where power is constantly on full throttle, tanks don't actually need to be opened often and hardware goes in and out very seldom.

Close to zero (as in 0.0x%) losses is what we achieve with our systems, but they are our third generation built on industrial grade and we have spent a considerable amount of engineering since early 2012. And only if you ignore the "spilling" when people handle the fluid, but that's down to human errors.

What's also more important is the loss after a hardware refresh, for instance when you retire some 40nm hardware and move to 28nm. When everything is said and done, how much fluid did you "throw out" with the old hardware? We've been working hard to minimize that - and the spilling of course  Grin

Getting fluid loss under control is what consumed most of our resources. Large systems would mean large losses if that is not handled properly.

(contrary to popular belief we have to pay 3M for the Novec so every little bit counts)


Are you running 7100 or what?
hero member
Activity: 489
Merit: 500
Immersionist
With 1% per month there is definitely something wrong with the design of the system, especially for Bitcoin mining where power is constantly on full throttle, tanks don't actually need to be opened often and hardware goes in and out very seldom.

Close to zero (as in 0.0x%) losses is what we achieve with our systems, but they are our third generation built on industrial grade and we have spent a considerable amount of engineering since early 2012. And only if you ignore the "spilling" when people handle the fluid, but that's down to human errors.

What's also more important is the loss after a hardware refresh, for instance when you retire some 40nm hardware and move to 28nm. When everything is said and done, how much fluid did you "throw out" with the old hardware? We've been working hard to minimize that - and the spilling of course  Grin

Getting fluid loss under control is what consumed most of our resources. Large systems would mean large losses if that is not handled properly.

(contrary to popular belief we have to pay 3M for the Novec so every little bit counts)
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