Data centers are mission critical facilities that typically contain thousands of data processing equipment, such as servers, switches, and routers. In recent years, there has been a boom in data center usage, leading their energy consumption to grow by about 10% a year continuously. The heat generated in these data centers must be removed so as to prevent high temperatures from degrading their reliability, which would cost additional energy. Therefore, precise and reliable thermal management of the data center environment is critical. This paper focuses on recent advancements in data center modeling and energy optimization. A number of currently available and developmental thermal management technology in data centers are broadly reviewed. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for raised-floor data centers, experimental measurements, containment systems, economizer cooling, hybrid cooling, and device level cooling are all thoroughly reviewed. The paper concludes with a summary and presents areas of potential future research, which are based on the holistic integration of workload prediction and allocation, and thermal management using smart control systems.
In a typical raised floor data center with alternating hot and cold aisles, air enters the front of each rack over the entire height of the rack. Since the heat loads of data processing equipment continue to increase at a rapid rate, it is a challenge to maintain the temperature of all the racks within the stated requirement. A facility manager has discretion in deciding the data center room layout, but a wrong decision will eventually lead to equipment failure. There are many complex decisions to be made early in the design as the data center evolves. Challenges occur such as optimizing the raised floor plenum, floor tile placement, minimizing the data center local hot spots, etc. These adjustments in configuration affect rack inlet air temperatures, which is one of the important keys to effective thermal management. In this paper, a raised floor data center with 12kW racks is considered. There are four rows of racks with alternating hot and cold aisle arrangement. Each row has six racks installed. Two air-conditioning units supply chilled air to the data center through the pressurized plenum. Effect of plenum depth, floor tile placement, and ceiling height on the rack inlet air temperature is discussed. Plots will be presented over the defined range. A multivariable approach to optimize data center room layout to minimize the rack inlet air temperature is proposed. Significant improvement over the initial model is shown by using a multivariable design optimization approach.
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