On June 5th, 2024, the NEIT Lab at the University of Maryland had the privilege of hosting Dr. Laurent Pilon, Program Manager at ARPA-E, and his colleague Dr. Thomas Bress. Dr. Pilon is overseeing our COOLERCHIPS project, and the visit was aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of our ongoing work in direct-to-chip evaporative cooling (DCEC) and the MOSTCOOL two-phase flow network modeling tool.

During their visit, Dr. Pilon and Dr. Bress engaged with our team to discuss the technical advances, challenges, and future directions of the project. They toured our experimental setups, observed progress on cold plate development, and learned about the integration of advanced modeling approaches to optimize two-phase cooling at the system level. The visit fostered valuable feedback and alignment with ARPA-E’s broader program goals for energy-efficient data center cooling.

This milestone visit coincided with another major achievement: at the end of May, our team successfully passed the ARPA-E Go/No-Go review milestone hosted at the University of Texas at Arlington. There, we demonstrated the implementation of our direct-to-chip evaporative cooling cold plate on a real server equipped with an NVIDIA GPU. This proof-of-concept marks a significant step toward validating the scalability and real-world impact of our technology for next-generation data centers.

The NEIT Lab is proud of these accomplishments and grateful for ARPA-E’s continued guidance and support. We look forward to advancing our research and contributing to ARPA-E’s mission of creating transformative energy technologies.