Access networks provide the last mile of connectivity to telecommunications customers throughout the world. Voice, data, and video services through fiber, copper, and wireless media are all delivered to the end user by the access portion of the network. In an access network, thermal management of active electronics and optical devices is critical to network reliability and performance. In these networks, outside plant telecom enclosures provide environmental protection for both active electronics and optical devices. These enclosures must incorporate cooling systems that support thermal requirements of the electronic and optical components. And, with ever-increasing sensitivity to environmental impacts, the enclosures and cooling systems must have minimal aesthetic and acoustic impact to their surroundings. Additionally, the enclosures must be developed with high sensitivity to cost as they are typically deployed in large number throughout a telecom service area. A number of thermal technologies are employed for thermal control of these enclosures. These includes air conditioning, heat exchangers, thermoelectric coolers, direct air filtering, and double-walled construction. In this paper, the double-walled construction technique and its impact on thermal performance will be discussed in detail.
Telecommunication shelters form an important component at different levels of the wireless access network. They are commonly used as transmission hubs and base transceiver stations. The telecom shelter protects wireless transmitters and receiver electronics in the wireless network. They are stand-alone, modular structures that are supported with their own electrical and HVAC systems. Based on their locations they are designed to work over a wide range of environmental conditions with temperatures ranging from −40°C to 55°C and may be exposed to high humidity, and saline and corrosive environments. Cooling/heating systems typically consume 30% of the energy required to operate a wireless cell site. There is, therefore, an impetus to embark on initiatives to reduce this percentage as part of an effort to both save money, and to reduce the carbon footprint. In this paper various thermal design options to cut down on cooling/heating energy loads for these shelters are discussed. The effect of substituting active cooling/heating equipments used in shelter with a hybrid one. The hybrid cooling system consists of both the air conditioner and a blower. CFD analysis is performed to compare these designs and come up with a robust design solution. The best cooling methodology showed an energy saving of 40% with minimal impact on design temperature.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used in the telecommunication industry to validate experimental data and obtain both qualitative and quantitative results during product development. A typical outdoor telecommunications cabinet requires the modeling of a large number of components in order to perform the required air flow and thermal design. Among these components, the heat exchanger is the most critical to thermal performance. The cabinet heat exchanger and other thermal components make up a complex thermal system. This thermal system must be characterized and optimized in a short time frame to support time-to-market requirements. CFD techniques allow for completing system thermal optimization long before product test data can be available. However, the computational model of the complex thermal system leads to a large mesh count and corresponding lengthy computational times. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of techniques to minimize the computational time for complex designs such as a heat exchanger used in telecommunication cabinets. The discussion herein presents the concepts which lead to developing a compact model of the heat exchanger, reducing the mesh count and thereby the computation time, without compromising the acceptability of the results. The model can be further simplified by identifying the components significantly affecting the physics of the problem and eliminating components that will not adversely affect either the fluid mechanics or heat transfer. This will further reduce the mesh density. Compact modeling, selective meshing, and replacing sub-components with simplified equivalent models all help reduce the overall model size. The model thus developed is compared to a benchmark case without the compact model. Given that the validity of compact models is not generalized, it is expected that this methodology can address this particular class of problems in telecommunications systems. The CFD code FLOTHERM™ by Flomerics is used to carry out the analysis.
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