“What are you actually cooling?” That was one of the questions Dimitri Wolf asked during his Data Centre World Frankfurt session, “Are We Cooling the Wrong Thing?” 

Wolf leads global sales at aquatherm GmbH, a manufacturer of polypropylene piping systems used in data centre cooling and other industrial applications. 

Before choosing pumps, chillers, or pipework, Wolf argued, operators need to understand the load first. How much energy can the facility handle? How much thermal waste can it process?

Those questions are becoming harder to ignore with rack densities rising. Wolf pointed to the familiar 19-inch rack, a design dating back decades. “It was never meant to handle 50 or even hundred kilowatts of pure thermal power inside the rack”, he said. 

That creates a problem beyond the rack itself. Once that much heat is being generated, the next question is where it can go. 

Wolf discussed possible uses for waste heat, including supplying biogas reactors and supporting other industrial processes. But those options depend heavily on location. Around Frankfurt, he noted, new sites may end up in more rural areas, where district heating networks may not be available. In those cases, there may be no obvious destination for the heat. 

That’s where aquatherm’s thermal plug concept comes in. Wolf described it as “a piece of pipe at the end of the data centre which bypasses the cooling loop, which can be sealed until you actually need it.” 

In practice, it means building the connection into the facility from the start. Even if there’s no immediate use for the waste heat, the site is not closed off from future opportunities. 

For Wolf, the wider question was whether a solution fits the infrastructure, can be scaled, is standardised and is widely available. 

He ended on a note of urgency: “We need to act quite quickly.” 

Find out more about the session, We Are Cooling the Wrong Thing: Why Data Centre Architecture Must Change, and meet speaker Dimitri Wolf on the Tech Show Frankfurt website.