Optimization of Data Center Room Layout to Minimize Rack Inlet Air Temperature

Abstract

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.

Optimization and Evaluation of Ventilation Mode in Marine Data Center Based on AHP-Entropy Weight

“…The cold air supply in the data center involves the interaction of high quality flow rates with complex thermal fluids [14]. The governing equations of fluid flow describing the property fields can be written as follows:…”

“…They believed that the supply/return air location was an important factor in high-density data centers. Sammakia et.al [14,15] found that some adjustment methods, such as minimizing local hot spots in the data center, affected the air inlet temperatures, which was one of the keys to effective thermal management. These studies took the approach of optimizing the data center layouts and cooling system schemes to achieve energy efficiency and maintain the indoor temperature within the recommended limits [16].…”

Optimization of the thermal environment of a small-scale data center in China

“…Researchers have explored airflow distribution optimization, including the optimization of air supply and return form [7,[26][27][28][29], both optimization and adjustment of equipment layout in the computer room [30][31][32][33][34], and studies on the influence of air flow characteristics under raised floor [35][36][37][38][39].…”

“…The influence study on characteristics of air flow under raised floor refers to the analyzed the uniformity of the thermal environment of the raised floor air supply computer room. Bhopte [36] et al discussed the effect of plenum depth, floor tile placement, and ceiling height on the rack inlet air temperature in a raised floor data center with 12 kW racks. And a multivariable approach to optimize data center room layout to minimize the rack inlet air temperature is proposed.…”

Electronics Thermal Management in Information and Communications Technologies: Challenges and Future Directions

“…During this period, the thermal community responded with several initiatives that improved TIMs [32,33,34,35], thermal metrology [36,37], modelling [38,39] and various building block technologies such as microchannel heatsinks [40,41,42,43,44], ionic wind [45], heat pipes [46,47], and thermoelectric coolers [48,49]. It also saw the emergence of major research efforts funded in the US by DARPA programs such as HERETIC (starting 1992), followed by nTIM, MACE, TGP, NJTT, and ACM (2008), and most recently by the Intra/Interchip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool) program (2012).…”