A numerical investigation of fan wall cooling system for modular air-cooled data center

Abstract Airflow management in the data center is one of the most researched topics to achieve uniform airflow for effective thermal management. Recently, the Fan Wall Cooling (FWC) system is popular in air-cooled data centers due to the advantage of no raised floor plenum. In this research, a validated CFD model is used to study the FWC performance with different configurations to gain insights for the optimum design. Five new configurations are proposed to optimize the FWC performance along with ordinary FWC. Each of them has a different rack-tilted and row-tilted angle. The results show that tilting the rack by 15° towards the supply air direction can increase the rack air flowrate by 2.5% (800 CFM), and reduce the maximum normalized server temperature ( T s e r , m a x ∗ ) by 7% from 1.30 to 1.21. The CFD simulations also reveal that all new configurations can effectively mitigate the airflow maldistribution. Lastly, the FWC exhibits superior thermal performance compared to the conventional Underfloor Air Delivery (UFAD) and the Overhead Air Supply (OHAS) methods.