OCP Immersion Fluids Guidelines, Specifications and Lifecycle Management

Author: Presenter (unnamed); OCP Fluids Committee Chair/Representative Collection: 2024 OCP Global Summit - Cooling Environments & Immersion

Summary

This presentation provides a comprehensive update from the OCP Fluids Committee — one of the four new technical committees in the restructured OCP Immersion project — covering the current landscape of immersion fluid documentation, four active workstreams, and a detailed dive into the newly launched Fluid Cleaning Guidelines workstream. The market context is striking: immersion-specific DC fluids have grown 20-fold in five years, from approximately 5 fluids offered by a couple of vendors in 2019 to over 100 fluids from 30–50 vendors in 2024. This explosion of choice has created an urgent need for standardized guidance on fluid selection, safety, lifecycle management, and cleaning.

The presentation catalogs the existing OCP fluid documentation ecosystem: Immersion Requirements V2.1 (fluid specifications and minimum requirements, revision ongoing); Material Compatibility Immersion Fluids Rev 0 (revision ongoing); Immersion Fluid Safe Handling Guidelines Rev 0 (submitted to Steering Committee); Intel OCP Base Fluid Specification Rev 0; and Design Guidelines for IT Equipment in Immersion (revision ongoing). All are accessible on the OCP Immersion Wiki. The first fluid to receive official OCP Marketplace listing and qualification is from Fuchs, achieved through the new fluid qualification process led by the Solutions Committee (Requirements workstream).

The four active Fluids Committee workstreams are: (1) Oxidation Methodology — developing a consistent quantitative method for measuring fluid oxidation and degradation over service lifetime, led by Ken Hope/Spencer Kars/Vanab Bond, with real field data from deployed immersion systems; (2) Fluid Lifecycle Management — addressing safe and sustainable disposal and recycling of immersion fluids across fluid types, led by Chris Fletcher and Brandon Marshall; (3) Safe Handling Guidelines — bridging chemical safety knowledge to data center operators for hydrocarbons, esters, and fluorinated liquids, led by Spencer Kars; (4) Fluid Cleaning Guidelines — establishing standardized procedures for cleaning immersion fluids from IT equipment, covering solvent selection, material compatibility, operational protocols, and HSSE (Health, Safety, Security, and Environment) compliance.