Rear Door Heat Exchanger Cooling Performance in Telecommunication Data Centers

Abstract

The increase in the data center server heat density waves a scope for developing improved cooling technologies without raising the power consumption. It is commonly observed that 40% of the total data center energy is consumed by its cooling equipments. For higher server density cabinets, typical air cooling techniques leads to a substantial increase in the power consumption. Rear door heat exchanger, an open looped cooling technique is one of the solutions for such scenarios. In this paper, emphasis is laid on the analytical determination of the optimum heat load after calculating the effectiveness of heat exchanger at given operating conditions of the data center and heat exchanger. Later, thermal analysis is performed and the working of heat exchanger is compared for different data center heat loads. Based on the results, a ‘rule of thumb’ is verified that rear door heat exchanger could be 100% efficient in cooling the cabinets of heat loads up to 27kW. Thus, for rack heat loads less than 27KW, CRAC units can be non-operational resulting in energy savings. Furthermore, effect of RDHx in different configuration is studied and compared.