Tuesday, 2 September, 2025 / Edition 74

No one really cares about oxygen until it’s in short supply. For example, elevation is not something anyone in Indiana (nor Texas) cares about, unless flooding is coming in. In the mountains of Colorado, though, elevation is often listed on the signs of cities, sometimes even if population isn’t. I know that my house is at 8,400’ elevation. I have no idea what elevation any of my houses were at before, because no one cared. It wasn’t a bragging right showing how tough you are living without a basic necessity of life. 

Oxygen is a hot topic this week as we go over an unexpected “breather” of it in this week’s edition, as well as some ways liquids can cool, rather than fry, your electronics. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Liquid Cooling Revolution in Data Centers

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“Next time your laptop is thirsty, don’t give it a drink,” said the IT guy at my school when I brought my laptop in because some water had gotten on the keyboard.

The irony: Water and electronics don’t mix, so when the phrase “immersion cooling” came up on my Facebook feed from Shell (creepy since I’ve never used Facebook search to find oil and gas things), I had to check it out.

Just because water and electronics don’t mix doesn’t mean fluids and electronics don’t mix.

A nice, cool dip: Quite the contrary, electronics are often cooled by fluids: typically air, but dielectric fluids are interwoven in our electronics, unbeknownst to most of us:

• Mineral oil is a hydrocarbon-based dielectric that is low-cost and highly thermally conductive, making it suitable for single-phase server immersion cooling.

• Other synthetic hydrocarbons offer improved stability, though, and even better dielectric properties.

• Fluorocarbon-based dielectrics are non-flammable and have low toxicity, making them perfect for high-risk electrical applications. If the name rings a bell, it’s because they were used in household refrigerators until their role in ozone depletion and other environmental hazards came to light.

• Silicones have good thermal stability and electrical insulating properties, so they are used in transformers and other high-voltage equipment.

The problem: Data centers are driving the AI revolution, but they require massive amounts of power, both to drive the servers but also to cool them.

The up and come’r: Liquid cooling is expected to account for 36% of data center thermal management revenue by 2028, according to the Dell’Oro Group, but a lack of certified immersion solutions that are proven and readily deployable is a bottleneck.

Shell has partnered with Intel to combine the latest and greatest in chip materials and cooling infrastructure with Shell’s expertise in synthetic hydrocarbons to tackle the issue.

All the scales: Liquid cooling can be done at all scales of computing: from chip to server to racks to full data centers!

X marks the spot: The difference lies in where the fluid is. On the chip and server side, the fluid flows in separate tubes across various components, but in immersion cooling, the server racks are immersed in a dielectric fluid formulated for that specific purpose.

Similar to the air-cooled solution, fluids in full immersion are constantly circulated so the hot components are exposed to cool fluid at all times.

The hot fluids are moved through a heat exchanger to help them cool off and recirculated back into their cooling duties.

When the dielectric fluid is formulated properly, the heat collected can be re-purposed for green energy use, such as district heating needs, packing a double-whammy for the environment.

Where’s the beef? This is all well and good, but what does it mean for geoscientists?

• The hunt for dielectric fluids involves a lot of chemistry and synthetic hydrocarbons, something some geochemists might take an interest in.

• Improving the extraction of heat from these fluids would only help in creating more energy, and we geoscientists shine at understanding heat flow from various fluids.

Go deeper: For more information on the latest partnership between Shell and Intel to develop this solution further, go here.

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Scientists Discover Oxygen-Breathing Metal Oxide

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Humans have long dreamed of turning one material into another easily.

The most popular stories were turning various objects into gold, sometimes via touch (Midas), other times via chemistry/magic (alchemy).

Fundamentally, the goal is to shift the chemical composition or structure of a material without requiring crazy conditions.

While it’s not gold, a team of international scientists has discovered just that in a strontium-iron-cobalt metal oxide (SFCO) that “breathes” oxygen.

Breath of life: The oxide can release oxygen when heated in a simple gas environment and take it back in…without losing structural integrity.

The study was led by Professor Hyoungjeen Jeen from the Department of Physics, Pusan National University, Korea, who said, “It is like giving the crystal lungs and it can inhale and exhale oxygen on command.”

Why it matters: Transition metal oxides (TMOs) have characteristics that make them attractive for energy storage, catalysis, superconductivity, and electronic devices, and the presence or absence of oxygen in the crystalline structure strongly influences those behaviors.

Previous shortfalls: Earlier work saw the crystalline structure break down or require conditions that would make commercial applications untenable.

What they did: The researchers were interested in the redox behavior of SFCO. They plopped it in reducing conditions using diluted hydrogen gas, heated the bonkers out of it, and held it at that high temperature for a while before cooling it again.

What they saw: As the crystalline structure adapted to conditions, there was “a cooperative but asymmetric redox response of Fe and Co in the SFCO system that stabilized an oxygen-deficient defective perovskite phase that cannot be accessed in single-cation systems.”

In other words, adding iron into the mix seemed to stabilize the structure and led researchers to think there’s a site and element-specific control on redox reactions in oxide systems with many cations.

Laying the groundwork: Importantly, the work opens the door to more research for programmable oxygen-deficient materials, where we can tweak the chemistry and/or structure of materials to make them behave the way we want under the conditions we want.

Why it matters: Controlling oxygen in materials is helpful in technologies like solid oxide fuel cells, thermal transistors, and smart windows that can adjust their heat flow based on various weather conditions.

The catch: The oxide requires cobalt, which is a mineral associated with unsafe mining practices and child labor in Democratic Republic of Congo, but maybe we geoscientists can play a role in finding other sources or similar materials.

Go deeper: For more information on the breakthrough, go here, or read the Nature paper here.

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