- Uravu Tatooine converts data center waste heat into usable clean water
- Liquid desiccant absorbs moisture and enables continuous water recovery cycles
- Cooling systems operate within acceptable temperature ranges for modern servers
Rising compute demand continues to strain every data center, especially as cooling systems consume large amounts of energy and water simultaneously.
A startup called Uravu has developed a cooling system that uses a saltwater liquid desiccant to extract water from hot air, potentially turning data centers from water consumers into water producers.
Since data centers currently reject massive amounts of waste heat into the atmosphere, Uravu's system captures that heat and puts it to work.
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How saltwater and waste heat work together to create fresh water
The system, dubbed Tatooine, uses a liquid desiccant to absorb moisture from warm air.
When that desiccant is heated using waste heat from the data center, it releases pure water vapor that can be condensed and collected.
The absorber runs at ambient temperature plus four degrees, which is already cool enough to replace a conventional cooling tower in many locations.
This liquid desiccant helps maintain a very low temperature, meaning operators can potentially replace their chiller or dry cooler entirely.
The salty solution then releases pure water in the desorber as vapor, with a vacuum pump lowering pressure to enable evaporation at lower temperatures.
Cooling water can be returned at 27 to 32 degrees Celsius, which falls within ASHRAE's permissible range for operating servers.
The system uses waste heat that would otherwise be rejected, keeping energy costs lower than conventional cooling methods.
"It quickly becomes an efficient and economically feasible solution," said Swapnil Shrivastav, CEO and co-founder of Uravu.
"That enables users to keep Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) low, and you can also claim negative Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) because you have surplus water that can be supplied to communities."
What the numbers look like for a typical data center
Uravu claims that for every megawatt of data center power, the system can generate up to 30 cubic meters of pure distilled surplus water per day.
That figure fluctuates depending on ambient humidity levels, but Shrivastav says the system generates at least five cubic meters of water at the lower end of the spectrum.
This water is pure enough for drinking or for other industrial processes, and its power consumption is one-fifth the power of an air-cooled chiller and half the power of a water-cooled chiller.
Uravu already has 40 clients in the hospitality sector, supplying bottled water from a machine at its labs in Bangalore that makes five cubic meters of pure water per day.
The company has developed a 125-kilowatt unit for small deployments and pilots, and its next goal is a one-megawatt block that can become a modular solution.
While the technology sounds promising, generating 5 to 30 cubic meters of water per megawatt means drawing 100 megawatts would need 100 of these units.
Also, the liquid desiccant system introduces saltwater into a facility designed for dry air and electronics, which is a nontrivial engineering challenge.
Still, for data centers in water-stressed regions where cooling accounts for a massive portion of operational costs, a system that simultaneously cools and creates water deserves serious attention.
The next 12 months of pilot deployments will determine whether this system lives up to the hype or remains a desert mirage.
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