Rasim Muratovic Sinks a Raspberry Pi Under Mineral Oil — to Prove It Will Still Work
A simple example of total immersion cooling, this fish tank brings its own chips.
YouTuber Rasim Muratovic has plunged a Raspberry Pi single-board computer into an fish tank, powered on — but thanks to the properties of mineral oil, the machine survived intact.
"We're going to see if a Raspberry Pi 2 [Model B] can actually swim. I'm not even kidding," Muratovic explains by way of introduction to his latest video, brought to our attention by the Raspberry Pi blog. "We're gonna see if the Raspberry Pi 2 can swim inside some mineral oil. I got a fish tank, I've got some mineral oil, I got a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, and we're going to see if it works submerged in that mineral oil."
While Muratovic's implementation — a small fish tank, still with gravel in the bottom, filled with mineral oil before a Raspberry Pi single-board computer is plunged into it — is simplified, it serves as an example of a technology used not-infrequently in high-performance computing: total immersion cooling. Unlike tap water, mineral oil is inherently non-conductive and thus safe around electronics; unlike air, it's also very good at conducting heat.
Simply shoving a device in a vat of oil will only work until the oil heats, of course, with real total immersion cooling systems ensuring the oil is pumped around the electronics and to a radiator where it can shed excess heat — but it's certainly possible for low-power hardware to survive without that feature, as Muratovic's video demonstrates.
"The Raspberry Pi is actually working right now. It's submerged under mineral oil, by the way, completely submerged under mineral oil. It's got all the cables connected to it. I connected it to this monitor and it completely works," Muratovic says during the demo.
The full video is reproduced above and on Muratovic's YouTube channel, Rasmurtech.
