Data Center Cooling Research

Why this work matters

Data center cooling has become one of the more consequential applied thermal engineering problems around, as compute demand (and power density per rack) keeps climbing. This work sits at the intersection of my Physics background and a genuinely industry-relevant problem — how to move heat out of dense compute infrastructure efficiently and reliably.

What I'm doing

I'm part of UCLA Professor Tiwei Wei's S-Pack lab, focused on thermal and fluid dynamics as applied to server and data center cooling systems, working under PhD student Yunchun Yang. I'm still early in figuring out whether this becomes a long-term specialization, but the work has given me hands-on exposure to how thermal engineering problems get approached experimentally and analytically, along with general exposure to a university lab's workflow and research process.

My responsibilities focus around building and maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure for the lab's experiments on 2-phase fluid instability, or more generally 2-phase flow in high heat flux systems. I personally wrote the data acquisition and control software for the flow loop, logging temperature, pressure, and flow rate data along with syncing it to a high-speed camera for visualizing the flow, along with remote control and automated shutoff of the power supplies in case of CHF (critical heat flux) events, in addition to wiring most of the electronics and sensors.

Additionally, I help my mentor, Yunchun, with smaller design tasks such as devising and implementing solutions for visualization and cooler mounting via CAD, resin 3D printing, and laser cutting, as well as running experiments. We expect to haves a paper published in November 2026.

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