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The increased power consumption and continued miniaturization of high-powered electronic components has presented many challenges to their thermal management. To improve the efficiency and reliability of these devices, the high amount of heat that they generate must be properly removed. In this paper, a three-dimensional numerical model has been developed and experimentally validated for several manifold heat sink designs. The goal was to enhance the heat sink's thermal performance while reducing the required pumping power by lowering the pressure drop across the heat sink. The considered designs were benchmarked to a commercially available heat sink in terms of their thermal and hydraulic performances. The proposed manifolds were designed to distribute fluid through alternating inlet and outlet branched internal channels. It was found that using the manifold design with 3 channels reduced the thermal resistance from 0.061 to 0.054 °C/W with a pressure drop reduction of 0.77 kPa from the commercial cold plate. A geometric parametric study was performed to investigate the effect of the manifold's internal channels width on the thermohydraulic performance of the proposed designs. It was found that the thermal resistance decreased as the manifold's channel width decreased, up until a certain width value, below which the thermal resistance started to increase while maintaining low pressure drop values. Where the thermal resistance significantly decreased in the 7 channels design by 16.4% and maintained a lower pressure drop value below 0.6 kpa.

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An increasingly common power saving practice in data center thermal management is to swap out air cooling unit blower fans with electronically commutated plug fans, the side effects of which are not fully understood. Therefore, it has become necessary to develop an overall understanding of backward curved blowers and compare the resulting flow, pressure, and temperature fields with forward curved ones in which the induced fields are characterized, compared and visualized in a reference data center. In this study, experimental and numerical characterization of backward curved blowers is introduced. Then, a physics-based Computational Fluid Dynamics model is built using the 6SigmaRoomTM tool to predict/simulate the measured fields. The parametric and sensitivity of the baseline modeling are investigated and considered. Different operating conditions are applied at the room level for experimental characterization, comparison, and illustration of the interaction between different CRAH technologies. The measured data is plotted and compared with the CFD model assessment to visualize the fields of interest. The results show that the fields are highly dependent on CRAH technology. The tile to CRAH airflow ratios for the flow constraints of scenarios 1, 2, 3, and 4 are 85.5%, 83.9%, 61%, and 59%, respectively. The corresponding leakage ratios are 14.5%, 16%, 38.9%, and 41%, respectively. Furthermore, the validated CFD model was used to investigate and compare the airflow pattern and plenum pressure distribution. Lastly, it is notable that a potential side effect of backward curved technology is the creation of airflow dead zone.