12.12.2025
On 11–12 December 2025, CoolHeatDC was officially launched at AIT's premises in Vienna.
An international consortium comprising six partners from Austria, Poland and Norway gathered to initiate collaboration on innovative, climate-friendly solutions for data center cooling and heat recovery. This international initiative marks a significant step forward in the development of cutting-edge, climate-friendly technologies for data center cooling and heat recovery.
Following the welcome address to the CoolHeatDC team by Thomas Fleckl, Head of the “Sustainable Thermal Energy Systems” Business Unit at AIT, Day 1 focused on getting to know one another and on aligning, coordinating, and discussing the first project activities. Each organization presented its role and introduced its project team.
Krzysztof Banasiak (SINTEF ER) presented WP2 – Definition of Use Cases and Framework Scenarios, which examines EU-27 district cooling trends (with emphasis on Norway, Austria, and Poland), evaluates excess-heat recovery pathways, and develops large-scale deployment scenarios for the CoolHeatDC concept. The work defines key performance indicators to benchmark the solution against conventional cooling and heat-upgrade technologies and identifies site requirements and potential heat off-takers.
Krzysztof also gave an overview over WP3 – Applicability of Natural Working Fluids in Two-Phase Immersion Cooling, which assesses natural refrigerants as alternatives to synthetic fluids for cooling power electronics and data center servers. Candidate fluids will be screened against WP2 KPIs, with selected options progressing to upscaled server-rack emulator testing in WP4.
Day 1 concluded with a working dinner and informal networking in Vienna’s city center.
Day 2 began with an overview of project management structures and governance as well as an overview of the tasks planned in the communication, dissemination and exploitation work package.
Jacek Smolka (Professor at SUT) presented WP4 – Computational and Laboratory Analysis of Two-Phase Immersion Cooling, which integrates simulations and experiments to optimize high–power-density, multi-server immersion cooling. A dedicated computational tool will be developed, and a validated test campaign will be conducted to evaluate system configurations and novel working fluids, addressing overheating, dry-out, and dead-volume minimization.
The remaining technical work packages, scheduled to commence in subsequent project phases, were introduced by Patrik Furda (Project Manager & Research Engineer at AIT).
The meeting concluded with a tour through AIT’s laboratory facilities, including the newly opened Heat Pump Laboratory (for testing heat pumps with heating capacities up to 100 kW ) and an accredited thermophysical laboratory for advanced material and property characterization and analysis.
The Kick-Off Meeting established a strong foundation for collaboration and set the project in motion toward delivering a sustainable, future proof cooling technology for high performance data center technologies with novel integrated heat-recovering technology.