Mechanical engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new approach to cooling computer chips that could reduce the share of energy data centers spend on thermal management. The method, published in Cell Reports Physical Science, pairs a mathematical design algorithm with an electrochemical 3D printing process to fabricate pure copper cold plates, components mounted directly on chips to draw away heat. Against conventional air-cooling systems, the technology would reduce the energy devoted to cooling from over 30% to roughly 1.1% of a data center’s total consumption.
“Cooling is the bottleneck in computer-chip design,” said first author Behnood Bazmi, mechanical engineering graduate student. “By bridging the gap between computational design and manufacturing capability, our approach provides a pathway for more energy-efficient liquid cooling of chips and other electronics.”
The Physics Problem Nobody Solved for 50 Years
For four to five decades, circulating air has been the default method for keeping processors from overheating. The problem is that modern chips generate far more heat than air can efficiently handle. As data centers multiply to meet demand from services like generative AI and cloud storage, their collective appetite for energy is rising sharply, projections suggest they could account for up to 12% of the U.S. national grid load by 2028.
Liquid direct-to-chip cooling has emerged as a more viable alternative. In these systems, a cold plate is mounted directly onto the chip, and a coolant flows past densely packed metal protrusions called fins, which enlarge the contact surface between the liquid and the hot component. Commercial versions of this technology already exist, but they have been engineered around cost, not performance. The new research addresses that trade-off head-on.
Topology Optimization and the Art of Impractical Shapes
The central innovation lies in a computational technique called topology optimization. Starting from a simple rectangular fin shape, an algorithm iteratively refines the geometry, evaluating at each step how much heat the fin transfers and how much energy it takes to push coolant past it. The process converges on a shape that is thermally optimal, but with its pointed peaks and irregular, jagged edges, that shape is far too intricate to be produced by conventional machining.
To bridge that gap, the team partnered with Fabric8Labs to use electrochemical additive manufacturing (ECAM), a process that builds copper structures layer by layer through electrochemical plating rather than melting or casting. This allows for feature resolution as fine as 30 to 50 micrometers and makes it possible to fabricate in pure copper, a material rarely used in 3D printing due to its processing difficulty but prized for its thermal conductivity.
“ECAM can manufacture pure copper parts with very fine detail, down to 30 to 50 micrometers, less than the width of a human hair,” said Founder Professor Nenad Miljkovic.
From Lab Benchmarks to Data Center Math
Head-to-head testing against standard rectangular-fin cold plates showed the optimized design achieved up to 32% better cooling capacity, while also cutting pressure drop, the resistance the pump must overcome to push fluid through, by as much as 68% at equivalent thermal performance. That pressure reduction directly translates to lower pumping energy requirements.
Scaled to a 1-gigawatt data center, the numbers are stark: conventional air-cooling would consume around 550 megawatts just for thermal management, pushing total facility consumption to 1.55 gigawatts. “With our cold plates, data centers would only need to use 11 megawatts for cooling instead of 550 megawatts,” said Miljkovic.
Beyond data centers, the researchers note the same design-and-fabrication workflow could be adapted to cooling challenges across different scales and industries.
Where the Industry Has Been Trying to Go
The challenge of 3D printing pure copper for thermal management is not new, but producing it with the geometric complexity needed for high-performance cooling has remained elusive. The material’s high reflectivity and thermal conductivity make it notoriously difficult to process with conventional laser-based methods, a problem the sector has been circling for years.
Among the more targeted efforts, Fabric8Labs was selected by AEWIN Technologies to supply thermal management components for its next-generation Edge AI systems. AEWIN deployed ECAM-based 3D micro-mesh boiler plates that expand heat exchanger surface area by over 900% and deliver thermal improvements greater than 1.3°C per 100W compared to other conventional alternatives. That collaboration demonstrated ECAM’s commercial viability, but it did not integrate algorithmic shape optimization into the design process.
Separately, Alloyed developed a 3D printed copper cooling plate designed for use in high-temperature computing systems such as data centers, featuring a lattice geometry that combines performance with reduced material usage. On the passive cooling side, the Danish Technological Institute and Heatflow developed a 3D printed cooling component for data centers intended to reduce energy consumption, using an evaporation-based system that requires no pumps and 3D printing the evaporator in aluminum as a single integrated component.
What the Illinois work adds is the missing link: a workflow where the geometry itself is derived from optimization, not approximated, and then manufactured in a material, pure copper, that most additive processes cannot reliably deliver. The combination of topology optimization and ECAM closes a gap that previous efforts approached from only one side at a time.
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Featured image shows Photo of the fabricated topology optimization (TO) fin array on a copper base. Photo via University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
