On September 16, SENSOR CHINA 2026 opened in Shanghai, bringing together leading companies, experts and technology providers from across the sensing industry. During the exhibition, the Smart Sensing Solutions Application Forum for Next-Generation Computing Centers was held alongside the event, focusing on sensing technologies for rapidly evolving AI and data center infrastructure.
Sibin Zhang, Marketing Director of Shanghai Zhaohui Pressure Apparatus Co., Ltd. (ZHYQ), was invited to deliver a keynote presentation titled “Sensors Empower CDU: Precision Sensing and Intelligent Control in the Liquid Cooling Era.”
Drawing on ZHYQ’s extensive experience in industrial sensing and measurement, Zhang explored how precision sensor technologies can improve the performance, reliability and intelligence of CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit) systems used in data center liquid cooling.
At SENSOR CHINA 2026, ZHYQ also received the “2026 Sensor Industry Sensing Pioneer Award” and officially introduced its new liquid-cooling-focused product, the CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer.
The combination of an industry award, a technical keynote and a new product launch reflects ZHYQ’s continued investment in precision sensing technologies and its growing focus on the rapidly expanding AI data center liquid cooling market.
27 Years of Sensor Expertise Recognized with the Sensing Pioneer Award
Receiving the 2026 Sensor Industry Sensing Pioneer Award represents industry recognition of ZHYQ’s long-term commitment to precision sensing technology.
Founded in 1999, ZHYQ has spent 27 years developing sensor, transmitter and intelligent monitoring technologies for industrial applications.
Behind the award is a long-term commitment to R&D, manufacturing and product reliability. With an integrated in-house development and production system, ZHYQ continues to advance sensor accuracy, stability and industrial reliability while supporting the localization of high-end sensing technologies across demanding applications.
Today, ZHYQ sensing solutions are used in areas including new energy, energy storage, high-end equipment, biopharmaceuticals, environmental protection and industrial automation.
Looking ahead, the industrial sensor market is accelerating toward digitalization, intelligence and miniaturization. ZHYQ is continuing to expand its portfolio for high-growth industries while developing international markets, with products and services reaching customers across more than 80 countries and regions.
ZHYQ Chairman Zhenghui Wu commented:
“There are no shortcuts in manufacturing. Long-term focus is what takes us further. We will continue to stay rooted in industry, uphold product quality and pursue innovation, using high-precision and intelligent sensing and control technologies to support the digital transformation of industries worldwide.”
AI Data Center Liquid Cooling Is Accelerating — and Sensing Technology Is Becoming Critical
During his presentation, Zhang discussed a central question for the liquid cooling industry:
How do sensors define the performance boundaries of a CDU system?
The rapid development of artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing data center computing density. As rack-level power density continues to rise, traditional air cooling faces increasing limitations in efficiency, thermal management and scalability.
As a result, direct liquid cooling is moving from an optional architecture toward a critical infrastructure technology for high-density AI data centers.
At the same time, energy-efficiency requirements are becoming increasingly important. Under China’s East Data, West Computing initiative, major computing hubs have adopted ambitious PUE targets, increasing demand for more efficient thermal-management technologies.
Liquid cooling is one of the key technologies supporting these goals.
However, cooling efficiency depends not only on pumps, heat exchangers and cold plates. It also depends on the quality of the real-time data feeding the CDU control system.
Pressure, temperature, flow and coolant-condition measurements all affect how precisely a CDU can regulate cooling capacity.
As Zhang emphasized during the presentation, higher-quality sensing data enables more precise system control, supporting energy-efficiency optimization, operational reliability and predictive maintenance.
The CDU Is the Heart of Liquid Cooling — Sensors Are Its Nervous System
“In the liquid cooling era, the CDU is the heart and sensors are the nervous system. No matter how powerful the heart is, without a responsive nervous system, it cannot deliver cooling precisely where it is needed.”
This analogy highlighted the increasingly important role of sensing technologies in modern CDU coolant distribution units.
Reliable CDU operation requires accurate monitoring and control of conventional parameters such as pressure, temperature and flow.
But ZHYQ believes next-generation CDU systems require visibility into two additional dimensions that are sometimes overlooked:
Coolant health and mechanical equipment health.
Coolant health includes parameters such as coolant concentration, conductivity, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen and ORP.
Mechanical health focuses on pumps and motors, using signals such as vibration, noise, bearing condition and electrical characteristics to identify developing equipment problems before they lead to system failure.
Together, these sensing layers can form a more comprehensive health-monitoring architecture for data center liquid cooling systems.
1. Coolant Health Monitoring: From Periodic Sampling to Real-Time Measurement
Coolant concentration directly affects important thermophysical properties, including specific heat capacity, viscosity and freezing point.
Maintaining the correct concentration is therefore essential to both the thermal performance and operational safety of a liquid cooling system.
Traditional manual sampling and laboratory testing provide only periodic snapshots of coolant condition. This can make it difficult to detect sudden concentration changes, coolant contamination or fluid degradation in real time.
An inline refractometer for coolant concentration monitoring provides continuous measurement directly within the liquid cooling loop, supplying high-frequency concentration data to the CDU control system.
This is one of the key applications behind ZHYQ’s newly introduced CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer.
Designed specifically for compact CDU installations and data center liquid cooling applications, the CZ-A enables continuous online monitoring of coolant concentration without relying on routine manual sampling.
When combined with conductivity, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen and ORP sensors, the inline refractometer can form part of a multidimensional coolant health monitoring system.
Such an architecture can help operators identify:
- Deviations in coolant concentration
- Changes associated with ion-exchange performance
- Glycol oxidation and acidification trends
- Coolant contamination
- Conditions that may contribute to microchannel cold-plate blockage
By moving from periodic inspection to real-time monitoring, CDU operators gain greater visibility into the condition of the cooling medium itself.
CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer Designed for Data Center CDU Systems
The newly launched CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer is designed for closed-loop liquid cooling systems used in AI data centers and high-density computing infrastructure.
Its compact structure allows installation in space-constrained CDU coolant distribution units, pipelines and equipment cabinets.
The CZ-A is designed for continuous online coolant concentration measurement and supports integration with industrial control systems through 4–20 mA analog output and RS485 Modbus communication.
Its corrosion-resistant stainless-steel construction and sapphire optical prism are designed for long-term operation in industrial liquid cooling environments.
By continuously measuring coolant concentration, the CZ-A inline coolant refractometer can provide real-time data to CDU controllers, BMS platforms or PLC systems, helping operators maintain appropriate coolant ratios and respond more quickly to abnormal changes.
For AI data centers where uptime, thermal stability and energy efficiency are critical, real-time coolant monitoring can become an important layer of the overall liquid cooling control strategy.
2. Mechanical Health Monitoring for Pumps and Motors
Circulation pumps and motors are among the most critical moving components inside a CDU.
Their mechanical condition directly affects coolant circulation and overall system availability.
A monitoring architecture built around vibration sensors and vibration analysis modules can help identify developing mechanical problems such as:
- Bearing wear
- Pump cavitation
- Coupling misalignment
- Rotor imbalance
When vibration sensing is combined with current and power monitoring, the system can also identify electrical abnormalities such as motor overload, phase loss and winding degradation.
This enables CDU maintenance strategies to evolve from scheduled inspection and post-failure repair toward condition-based and predictive maintenance.
Data from both coolant-health and equipment-health sensing layers can be transmitted to the CDU controller through interfaces such as RS485/Modbus or IO-Link.
These multidimensional data streams can then support advanced analytics and control functions including PUE optimization, predictive maintenance and intelligent cooling-system scheduling.
Five Sensor Technology Trends Shaping the Next Decade of Data Center Liquid Cooling
As CDU systems evolve alongside increasingly powerful AI computing infrastructure, Zhang highlighted five sensing technology directions that ZHYQ believes will become increasingly important over the next decade.
1. Higher-Accuracy Pressure Sensing
Constant differential-pressure control is an important strategy for optimizing CDU operation.
As liquid cooling systems become more sophisticated, pressure sensors are expected to move toward accuracy levels of ±0.1% FS and beyond.
Achieving this level of performance requires improvements across the entire measurement chain, including sensing elements, laser trimming, digital temperature compensation, high-resolution ADC signal processing and multi-point temperature calibration.
Higher-quality pressure data can enable more precise pump and valve control and contribute to overall system energy-efficiency optimization.
2. Wide-Temperature Reliability
Liquid cooling operating temperatures are evolving as data centers pursue higher cooling efficiency and increased opportunities for heat reuse.
Future sensors must therefore maintain stable performance across broader temperature ranges.
For demanding CDU applications, sensor technologies capable of maintaining measurement stability across temperatures ranging from approximately -40°C to 150°C can provide greater design flexibility and reliability.
3. Digital Communication Interfaces
Industrial sensing is moving beyond traditional 4–20 mA analog signals toward intelligent digital communication.
Interfaces such as IO-Link, RS485/Modbus and Industrial Ethernet-based protocols allow sensors to provide not only measurement values but also diagnostics, device status and configuration information.
This transition enables the sensor to evolve from a simple measurement component into a data node within the intelligent liquid cooling system.
4. Comprehensive Coolant Health Management
The inline refractometer provides an effective starting point for real-time coolant health monitoring.
Building on coolant concentration measurement, future systems can integrate:
Concentration + Conductivity + pH + Turbidity + Dissolved Oxygen + ORP
to create a six-dimensional coolant health monitoring architecture.
This approach can help data center operators shift from reactive coolant replacement toward proactive coolant management based on real-time condition data.
The CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer is designed to serve as one of the key sensing components within this architecture.
5. Predictive Maintenance for CDU Equipment
Predictive maintenance is another major direction for next-generation CDU systems.
By combining vibration sensors, condition-monitoring modules and electrical measurements, operators can establish a health-monitoring system for pumps and motors.
Instead of waiting until equipment fails, developing abnormalities can be detected earlier, helping reduce unplanned downtime and improve the availability of critical AI computing infrastructure.
Precision Sensing for the Next Generation of AI Data Center Liquid Cooling
From technology development and product innovation to industry collaboration, ZHYQ has spent 27 years advancing precision sensing and industrial measurement technologies.
As AI infrastructure drives the adoption of higher-density computing and liquid cooling, sensing technologies are becoming increasingly important to the reliability, efficiency and intelligence of CDU systems.
ZHYQ plans to continue developing high-accuracy, digital and intelligent sensing solutions for data center liquid cooling, including pressure, temperature, flow, coolant condition and equipment health monitoring.
With the launch of the CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer, ZHYQ is expanding its CDU-focused product portfolio with a compact solution designed for continuous coolant concentration monitoring.
By combining precision sensing with real-time data acquisition and intelligent control, ZHYQ aims to support the next generation of AI data center CDU liquid cooling systems and provide reliable sensing technologies for computing infrastructure worldwide.
For more information about the CZ-A Miniature Inline Refractometer or ZHYQ’s CDU liquid cooling monitoring solutions, please contact:
Email: info@zhyqsensor.com.au
Leave A Comment