Numerical Investigation of Thermal Performance with Adaptive Terminal Devices for Cold Aisle Containment in Data Centers

The energy consumption of data center cooling systems accounts for a large proportion of total energy consumption. The optimization of airflow organization is one of the most important methods to improve the energy efficiency of cooling systems. The adjustment scale of many current air flow organization methods, however, is too large and does not support the data center’s refined operation. In this paper, a new type of air supply terminal device is proposed, and it could adaptively adjust according to the power of servers in the rack for cold air redistribution. In addition, the corresponding regulation strategy is proposed. A CFD model is established according to field investigation of a real data center in Shanghai to investigate the adjustment range and the energy saving potential of the device. The simulation results indicate that the device can suppress the local hot spots caused by excessive server power to some extent and greatly improve the uniformity of servers exhaust temperature. The case study shows that the device can save energy consumption by 20.1% and 4.2% in mitigating local hot spots compared with reducing supply air temperature and increasing supply air flowrate.

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