Abstract
The energy consumption of fast-growing data centers is drawing attentions from not only energy organizations and institutions all over the world, but also charity groups, such as Greenpeace, and research shows that the power consumption of air conditioning makes up a large proportion of the electricity cost in data centers. Therefore, more detailed investigations of air conditioning power consumption are warranted. Three types of airflow distributions with different aisle layouts (the open aisle, the closed cold aisle, and the closed hot aisle) were investigated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods in a typical data center of four rows of racks in this study. To evaluate the results of thermal and bypass phenomenon, the temperature increase index (β) and the energy utilization index (ηr) were used. The simulations show that there is a better trend of the β index and ηr index both closed cold aisle and closed hot aisle compared with free open aisle. Especially with high air flow rate, the β index decreases and the ηr index increases considerably. Moreover, the results prove the closed aisles (both closed cold aisle and closed hot aisle) can not only significantly improve the airflow distribution, but also reduce the mixture of cold and heat flow, and therefore improve energy efficiency. In addition, it proves the design of the closed aisles can meet the increasing density of installations and our simulation method could evaluate the cooling capacity easily.
Highlights
A huge amount of energy is consumed by data centers every year to meet large-scale integrated circuit computing, data exchanges, information communication, and data-storage [1]
By the end of 2017, in China, the annual electricity consumption of data center is more than 2% of their total social electricity consumption [2]
Researchers are paying more attentions on the improvement of energy saving through adjusting the air conditioning in computer rooms, and focusing on the improvement of the thermal environment and energy efficiency
Summary
A huge amount of energy is consumed by data centers every year to meet large-scale integrated circuit computing, data exchanges, information communication, and data-storage [1]. For a semi-enclosed cold aisle with a raised floor, the recirculation and bypass of airflow around racks were reduced, and the performance of the cooling of data centers for different configurations were improved with about 18%–20% reduction of RTI and SHI and about 8%–18% increase of RCIHI [19]. The design of the enclosed cold aisle could decrease the exhaust air temperatures, and increase the heat transfer and distribute the exhaust air, and the cooling efficiency was improved. Experiments taken out by Fulpagare et al [31] showed that the transient effect of racks are significant and cannot be ignored using CFD model of three racks in a raised floor data center with cold and hot aisle containment. The detailed turbulence model can be found in Reference [5], such as the equations of turbulence models, model constants, boundary conditions, initial conditions, and iteration scheme
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