Sustainability assessment and emergy analysis of employing the CCHP system under two different scenarios in a data center

Abstract

The high energy consumption of the data centers is a major challenge in sustainable development. In addition to the energy consumption of Information Technology (IT) section in a data center, the energy consumed in the cooling section for eliminating the heat generated by these centers is also significant. For this reason, finding an effective solution to decrease the energy consumption and to increase the energy efficiency in data centers has recently given much attention by researchers. In this paper, the combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) system is employed in a data center based on absorption chiller scenario and compression chiller scenario. The proposed CCHP systems for the data center are evaluated in case of sustainability using emergy analysis taking into account non-renewable/renewable environmental resources and non-renewable/renewable purchased inputs as well as the other environmental viewpoints. Results show that the total emergy consumption using the first and second scenario is 4.02 E+18 and 6.01 E+18 solar emjoule, respectively. It was found that the maximum emergy consumption in the first scenario is related to absorption chiller by 3.49 E+18 solar emjoule and the maximum emergy consumption in second scenario is related to compression chiller by 5.24 E+18 solar emjoule. In addition, using the first and second scenario, the sustainability index is obtained 1.70 and 2.50 respectively, which indicates that the second scenario is more sustainable than the first one.