#Industry News
The CDU Decoded, a Component-Level Guide to Cooling Distribution Units for Liquid-Cooled Data Centers
From Pump Curves to Beta-5000 Filtration: The Component Decisions That Keep the Secondary Loop Alive
A CDU is more than a heat exchange terminal: it integrates pumps and controls to decouple the primary Facility Water System from the secondary Technology Cooling System. Pump selection is the core engineering decision—centrifugal pumps dominate, with canned motor pumps the common in-rack choice, fully sealed with no mechanical seal. The brazed plate heat exchanger scales to three parallel BPHEs at 2.5MW, while Beta-5000 filtration protects microchannels from catastrophic blockage. Sensors—temperature, pressure, flow and coolant quality—and expansion tanks keep the loop safe, venting gas and absorbing thermal expansion. EXTRCOOL provides one-stop liquid cooling solutions.