Advantage of Immersion Cooling for Bitcoin Miners

Traditionally, Bitcoin miner is designed with high-speed fan to force air flow through the internal components of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), so as to actively cool hashing boards – the computer chips do hashing algorithm day and night.

If the design can effectively eliminate the heat generated by hashing boards, it can improve the computing power of each hashing board and reduce the total operation cost of Bitcoin miner. The main purpose of cooling the Bitcoin miner is to provide the maximum cooling capacity with the lowest cost. And “air cooled” cooling solution for Bitcoin miner is the traditional and simple way by ventilation fans.

"air cooled" cooling solution for Bitcoin miners

While immersion cooling solution for Bitcoin miner uses pump and dielectric fluid in stead of air to remove the heat of hashing boards.

Immersion cooling is to immerse hashing boards or miner in the tank full of dielectric fluid, which has better insulation and thermal conductivity than air. It may be counterintuitive at first, but immersion cooling provides more heat removal from hashing boards and miners by immersing them in dielectric fluid.

Immersion Cooling Solution for Bitcoin Miner

Just like other electrical devices, ASIC will eventually have failure as time goes by, and this is called “failure rate”. Permanent chip damage is normally caused by high operating temperature for long time, including thermal runaway due to increased leakage current, higher quantization error rate due to reduced signal-to-noise ratio, irreversible overheating of transistors, and additional loss of transistor control.

Reducing the failure rate of Bitcoin miner through cooling optimization will in turn bring additional profits. Therefore, immersion cooling can reduce the failure rate, increase computing power and extend service life.

Advantages of immersion cooling solution:

Immersion cooling can reduce the failure rate of Bitcoin miners. Immersion cooling also allows easier overclocking of ASICs, which involves increasing the computing power (TH/s) of Bitcoin miners, but also increases power consumption and heat generation.

One aspect that is sometimes ignored in the operation of Bitcoin miners is the pure noise generated by a single ASIC, usually within the range of 70 to 80 decibels (dB), or similar to the sound of a vacuum cleaner. If done well, “air-cooled” cooling solution can reduce noise by approx. 10 to 20 dB with silencing materials. However, the immersion cooling actually eliminates the operation noise that the ASIC cannot bear, so that the background noise cannot be detected.

The cost of immersion cooling solution is high, and the required upfront funds are unfriendly to those new miners. They need to know the dielectric fluid that matches the current miners. The selection and design of immersion cooling components such as pipes, tanks and pumps require additional research and setup time. The dielectric fluid, as cooling medium, must be recirculated between the tank and the dry cooler at a precise rate, otherwise the Bitcoin miner may overheat. If the fluid flows too slowly, the heat will not be fully discharged from the chip radiator. If the fluid flows too fast, the heat exchange between the chip and the fluid will not work properly, and the ASIC will overheat. Not to mention, if tanks, pumps and interconnected piping systems are not hermetically sealed, expensive dielectric fluid will leak. Besides, dry cooler supporting immersion cooling needs accurate design and selection too. For example, Dalian Yongsung Refrigeration Co., Ltd. has expertise and experience for providing custom design dry coolers for immersion cooling projects in Bitcoin miner industry.