EMCOOL Contributes to the Third Edition of Wiley’s Data Center Handbook

EMCOOL is pleased to share that Dr. Daniel Lorenzini and Professor Yogendra K. Joshi have completed and submitted an invited chapter for the upcoming third edition of the Data Center Handbook, published by John Wiley & Sons.

The chapter, titled “Cooling Distribution Unit: Design, Operations, and Maintenance,” provides a practical and technically grounded review of Cooling Distribution Units (CDUs), a critical component of modern liquid-cooled data center infrastructure. The contribution covers CDU architecture, thermal and hydraulic design considerations, controls and operating strategies, reliability, maintenance, and integration with facility and technology cooling systems.

Particular attention is given to the rapidly evolving requirements of high-density computing and AI infrastructure, where increasing rack power densities are creating new challenges for coolant distribution, flow management, heat rejection, reliability, and overall system efficiency.

Drawing from the authors’ combined experience across academic research, experimental development, and practical liquid-cooling system engineering, the chapter also discusses emerging design considerations and future directions for CDUs as data centers transition toward increasingly capable liquid-cooling architectures.

Improving thermal-management efficiency is becoming an important part of addressing the growing energy demands of AI and high-performance computing. Through this contribution, Dr. Lorenzini and Professor Joshi provide perspectives on how better-designed and better-operated coolant distribution systems can support higher-density, more energy-efficient, and more sustainable data center infrastructure.

We are grateful to Hwaiyu Geng, P.E., editor of the Data Center Handbook, for the invitation to contribute to this new edition and for the opportunity to share our experience with the broader data center engineering community.

We look forward to sharing additional details once the third edition is published.