Data centers house a variety of compute, storage, network IT hardware where equipment reliability is of utmost importance. Heat generated by the IT equipment can substantially reduce its service life if Tjmax, maximum temperature that the microelectronic device tolerates to guarantee reliable operation, is exceeded. Hence, data center rooms are bound to maintain continuous conditioning of the cooling medium becoming large energy consumers.
The objective of this work is to introduce and evaluate a new end-of-aisle cooling design which consists of three cooling configurations. The key objectives of close-coupled cooling are to enable a controlled cooling of the IT equipment, flexible as well as modular design, and containment of hot air exhaust from the cold air. The thermal performance of the proposed solution is evaluated using CFD modeling. A computational model of a small size data center room has been developed. Larger axial fans are selected and placed at rack-level which constitute the rack-fan wall design. The model consists of 10 electronic racks each dissipating a heat load of 8kw. The room is modeled to be hot aisle containment i.e. the hot air exhaust exiting for each row is contained and directed within a specific volume. Each rack has passive IT with no server fans and the servers are cooled by means of rack fan wall. The cold aisle is separated with hot aisle by means of banks of heat exchangers placed on the either sides of the aisle containment. Based on the placement of rack fans, the design is divided to three sub designs — case 1: passive heat exchangers with rack fan walls; case 2: active heat exchangers (HXs coupled with fans) with rack fan walls; case 3: active heat exchangers (hxs coupled with fans) with no rack fans. The cooling performance is calculated based on the thermal and flow parameters obtained for all three configurations. The computational data obtained has shown that the case 1 is used only for lower system resistance IT. However, case 2 and Case 3 can handle denser IT systems. Case 3 is the design that can consume lower fan energy as well as handle denser IT systems. The paper also discusses the cooling behavior of each type of design.
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Thermal and Exergy Analysis in UPS and Battery Rooms by Numerical Simulations
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) units and batteries are essential subsystems in data centers or telecom industries to protect equipment from electrical power spikes, surges and power outages. UPS units handle electrical power and dissipate a large amount of heat, and possess a high efficiency. Therefore, cooling units (e.g., CRACs) are needed to manage the thermal reliability of this equipment. On the other hand, battery operating conditions and reliability are closely related to the ambient temperature according to battery
manufacturers; reliability increases when the ambient room temperature is around 25ºC. This study analyzed different room configurations and scenarios using the commercial CFD software 6Sigma Room DCXTM. As a first approach, we evaluated the thermal behavior and cooling degradation using standard thermal performance metrics SHI (Supply Heat Index) and RHI (Return Heat Index). These are frequently implemented in data centers to measure the level of mixing between cold and hot air streams. The results from this evaluation showed that standard cooling practices are inefficient, as values for the two metrics differed considerably from industry recommendations. We also considered a metric from the second law of thermodynamics using exergy
destruction. This technique allowed us to find the mechanisms that increase entropy generation the most, including viscous shear and air stream mixing. Reducing exergy destruction will result in lessening lost thermodynamic work and thus reduce energy required for cooling. Typically, UPS and batteries are
located in different rooms due to the hydrogen generation by the batteries. The integration of both equipment in the same room is a new concept, and this study aims to analyze the thermal performance of the room. Adding controllability
showed improvements by reducing the exergy destruction due to viscous dissipation while slightly increasing thermal mixing in the rooms. Ducting the return flows to avoid flow mixing increased pressure drop, but reduced heat transfer between the hot and cold air streams, which in turn, improved the thermal performance. In the study, we determined the optimal configuration and possible strategies to improve cooling while maintaining desirable battery temperatures.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1738782
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10065781
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ITHERM
- ISSN:
- 1936-3958
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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