Design Analysis and Performance Evaluation of a Data Center With Indirect Evaporative Cooling

Author(s):  
Fatemeh Tavakkoli ◽  
Siavash Ebrahimi ◽  
Xiaogang Sun ◽  
Yan Cui ◽  
Ali Heydari

With the rapid growth of data centers worldwide and the global shift towards energy sustainability, deploying new cooling technologies has an utmost importance. Conventional cooling systems such as chilled water system, usually have high capital costs and relatively low energy efficiency, leading to a high PUE and TCO values. Indirect evaporative cooling is a promising technology, which offers air cooling with high efficiency, hygiene air quality, and lower total cost. This paper details the design of a proof-of-concept data center with indirect evaporative cooling, which will be eventually deployed at megawatt-scale Baidu datacenters. BIN data analysis and CFD simulation are performed to optimize the physical design and operating conditions. CFD analysis of the data center room is established to optimize rack placement, air flow management, and cold aisle hot aisle configuration. A comprehensive TCO analysis is established, which shows a total savings of 9% using IDEC technology compared to chilled water system for cooling. In addition, TCO analysis indicates small to negligible effect of air supply temperature. Hence, air supply to the cold aisle is set to 27 °C to improve cooling performance. Finally, ROI sensitivity analysis is performed to measure the sensitivity of ROI on power usage effectiveness of the IDEC unit.

Author(s):  
Renata Portela de Abreu ◽  
Victor Hugo Lobo Correia ◽  
Adriano Marques ◽  
monica carvalho

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3608
Author(s):  
Yang Yuan ◽  
Neng Zhu ◽  
Haizhu Zhou ◽  
Hai Wang

To enhance the energy performance of a central air-conditioning system, an effective control method for the chilled water system is always essential. However, it is a real challenge to distribute exact cooling energy to multiple terminal units in different floors via a complex chilled water network. To mitigate hydraulic imbalance in a complex chilled water system, many throttle valves and variable-speed pumps are installed, which are usually regulated by PID-based controllers. Due to the severe hydraulic coupling among the valves and pumps, the hydraulic oscillation phenomena often occur while using those feedback-based controllers. Based on a data-calibrated water distribution model which can accurately predict the hydraulic behaviors of a chilled water system, a new Model Predictive Control (MPC) method is proposed in this study. The proposed method is validated by a real-life chilled water system in a 22-floor hotel. By the proposed method, the valves and pumps can be regulated safely without any hydraulic oscillations. Simultaneously, the hydraulic imbalance among different floors is also eliminated, which can save 23.3% electricity consumption of the pumps.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (22) ◽  
pp. 7825
Author(s):  
Pradeep Shakya ◽  
Gimson Ng ◽  
Xiaoli Zhou ◽  
Yew Wah Wong ◽  
Swapnil Dubey ◽  
...  

A hybrid cooling system which combines natural ventilation with a radiant cooling system for a hot and humid climate was studied. Indirect evaporative cooling was used to produce chilled water at temperatures slightly higher than the dew point. With this hybrid system, the condensation issue on the panel surface of a chilled ceiling was overcome. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was employed to determine the cooling load and the parameters required for thermal comfort analysis for this hybrid system in an office-sized, well-insulated test room. Upon closer investigation, it was found that the thermal comfort by the hybrid system was acceptable only in limited outdoor conditions. Therefore, the hybrid system with a secondary fresh air supply system was suggested. Furthermore, the energy consumptions of conventional all-air, radiant cooling, and hybrid systems including the secondary air supply system were compared under similar thermal comfort conditions. The predicted results indicated that the hybrid system saves up to 77% and 61% of primary energy when compared with all-air and radiant cooling systems, respectively, while maintaining similar thermal comfort.


2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Eiland ◽  
John Edward Fernandes ◽  
Marianna Vallejo ◽  
Ashwin Siddarth ◽  
Dereje Agonafer ◽  
...  

Complete immersion of servers in dielectric mineral oil has recently become a promising technique for minimizing cooling energy consumption in data centers. However, a lack of sufficient published data and long-term documentation of oil immersion cooling performance make most data center operators hesitant to apply these approaches to their mission critical facilities. In this study, a single server was fully submerged horizontally in mineral oil. Experiments were conducted to observe the effects of varying the volumetric flow rate and oil inlet temperature on thermal performance and power consumption of the server. Specifically, temperature measurements of the central processing units (CPUs), motherboard (MB) components, and bulk fluid were recorded at steady-state conditions. These results provide an initial bounding envelope of environmental conditions suitable for an oil immersion data center. Comparing with results from baseline tests performed with traditional air cooling, the technology shows a 34.4% reduction in the thermal resistance of the system. Overall, the cooling loop was able to achieve partial power usage effectiveness (pPUECooling) values as low as 1.03. This server level study provides a preview of possible facility energy savings by utilizing high temperature, low flow rate oil for cooling. A discussion on additional opportunities for optimization of information technology (IT) hardware and implementation of oil cooling is also included.


Author(s):  
I Nyoman Suprapta Winaya ◽  
Hendra Wijaksana ◽  
Made Sucipta ◽  
Ainul Ghurri

The high energy consumption of compressor based cooling system has prompted the researchers to study and develop non-compressor based cooling system that less energy consumption, less environment damaging but still has high enough cooling performances. Indirect and semi indirect evaporative cooling system is the feasible non-compressor based cooling systems that can reach the cooling performance required. This two evaporative cooling system has some different in construction, porous material used, airflow scheme and secondary air cooling method used for various applications. This paper would report the cooling performances achieved by those two cooling system in terms of cooling efficiency, cooling capacity, wet bulb effectiveness, dew point effectiveness, and temperature drop. Porous material used in indirect and semi-indirect evaporative cooling would be highlighted in terms of their type, size, thickness and any other feature. The introduction of nanopore skinless bamboo potency as a new porous material for either indirect or semi-indirect evaporative cooling would be described. In the future study of nanopore skinless bamboo, a surface morphology and several hygrothermal test including sorption, water vapor transmission, thermal conductivity test would be applied, before it utilize as a new porous material for direct or semi indirect evaporative cooling.


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