Optimal thermal management on server cooling system to achieve minimal energy consumption based on air-cooled chiller

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of data centers toward high heat flux density, traditional air-cooled has gradually failed to meet the cooling requirements. So the liquid cooling for data centers is an important area for future development, and current research focuses on developing efficient heat sink structures or constructing energy-saving cold source schemes. However, to-date, there has been no integration of these two facets and consequently current results are limited by a lack of comprehensive analysis of the entire cooling system. Consequently, liquid cooling for data centers was developed in this study, and a comprehensive thermal management performance analysis was conducted, including a heat sink and cold source. A minimum energy consumption analysis was performed to determine an optimal thermal management strategy by constructing a 4.8 kW data center cooling system, containing 400 W for each chip, with the aid of TRNSYS software. Taking 70 °C as the safe temperature for the chips, the power consumption of pumps and an air-cooled chiller were explored by analyzing the internal relationships between server inlet temperature, chiller supply water temperature, ambient temperature, and rates of water flow; and optimal thermal management was achieved. In addition, the corresponding fitted correlations for the optimal rates of water flow for different chiller supply water temperatures, are provided to guide the optimal design of cooling systems.