Castrol testing immersion cooling at UK headquarters

Castrol, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BP that specializes in lubricants, is planning to build an immersion cooling test site at its UK headquarters.

Testing will focus specifically on immersion cooling for the data centre and for IT infrastructure.

The site is planned as part of BP’s £50 million investment in a battery test center and analytic laboratories at Castrol’s headquarters in Pangbourne, UK.

Earlier this year the company announced a partnership with Submer, a leader in immersion cooling, to accelerate adoption of liquid immersion cooling in the data centre. The Submer SmartPod and MicroPod tank systems, adapted for fluid and server equipment testing, will be installed in the Castrol test facility.

The new test site will be used to develop ways to capture and reuse waste heat from the data centre to improve efficiency and sustainability. Immersion cooling helps to reduce the power used to keep data centre equipment cool, as well as reducing the water consumption of data centres. With increasing attention paid to the stress that data centre power usage puts on electrical grid systems, accelerating adoption of technologies like liquid immersion cooling is key to the future of the industry.

Rebecca Yates, Technology Vice President at BP, stressed the importance of immersion cooling for the data centre. “Immersion-cooled data centres could bring huge gains in performance and big reductions in energy wasted in cooling. Together, Submer and Castrol aim to deliver sustainable solutions as demand for computer power continues to surge.”

“This investment in proven Submer systems is a key step towards joint development with the goal of enhancing performance and improving data centre sustainability even further through integrated energy solutions.”

Data centre is not Castrol’s first foray into the world of immersion cooling. This summer, the company partnered with Xing Mobility to deploy Castrol EV Thermal Fluid in Xing Mobiity’s integrated battery system, to unlock the full potential of electric vehicle powertrains. For EV applications, Castrol lubricant is circulated throughout the Xing battery system, in direct contact with the battery cells, similar to immersion cooling methods in the data centre.