Answer
Jan 17, 2022 - 08:28 AM
Shell Diala® is an mineral oil made to cool distribution transformers. We're well acquainted with transformer oils, including Diala. The problem with using any transformer oil to cool miners is that transformer oils are made from napthenic oils, which act as solvents to rubber and plastic materials. Transformer oils are made to be compatible with a very small set of materials that are found in transformers. Transformers don’t have the circuit boards, components, CPUs and cables that an ASIC miner does. Transformer oils will cool these devices fine, but sooner or later, there will be compatibility problems – most likely in the form of delamination of circuit boards and swelling of the little rubber plugs that go into electrolytic capacitors.
Here’s a picture of a GPU card that was ruined because it was immersed in mineral oil – note the capacitors have been pushed away from the circuit board because the rubber in them swelled as a reaction to the mineral oil:
As we have said before, any oil will move heat around; that’s not the tricky part of immersion cooling. The tricky part is making a coolant fluid that guarantees compatibility with your electronics. We’ve done that with BitCool BC-888; that’s why offer a guarantee. Shell (or any other mineral oil supplier) won’t guarantee any compatibility; if your miner fails, you’re on your own.
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