Improving energy and water consumption of a data center via air free-cooling economization: The effect weather on its performance

Abstract

In the past two decades, data centers have significantly grown in size and number around the globe, leading to substantial energy and water stress wherever they operate. Thermal management typically represents half of the total energy consumption in traditional data centers. This work studies the energy and water savings that air-side free-cooling yields under diverse weather conditions. We modeled a free-cooling system and a conventional data center using MATLAB. The hourly weather data was obtained from a publicly available online repository for the Chilean territory. Using air-side free-cooling for data center thermal management is feasible in various weather conditions. Locations with colder temperatures (< 20 °C) and higher humidity (> 60%) are more favorable as they require minimal use of the chiller and/or humidifier. These conditions are present in BSk’(s) Cold Semi-arid climate with dry summer and oceanic influence, as well as Csb’ Mediterranean climate (warm summer) with oceanic influence. However, locations with drier air (< 50%) and warmer temperatures (> 20 °C), such as those found in ET(w) Tundra climate with dry winter, BWk(w) Cold Desert climate with dry winter, or BSk(s) Cold Semi-arid climate with dry summer, are less suitable for air free cooling. Even under suboptimal energy and water savings, the air-side economizer still performed considerably better than a conventional data center cooling method (using CRAH units).