Numerical Study of Data Center Composite Cooling System

During recent years, the energy consumption of data centers (DCs) has doubled every four years, and DCs accounted for about 3% of the global electricity consumption in 2010. In order to reduce the specific energy consumption, methods for improving the thermal performance of data center have been proposed. In this paper, a composite cooling system combining a heat pipe technology and overhead floor return air technology was introduced. In this study, two novel concepts (i.e., no server upper heat pipe exchanger and server upper heat pipe exchanger) were developed and compared using the Airpak 3.0 software packages. Simulation results show that the new system proposed can effectively improve the thermal environment in high-density data center. Simultaneously, the energy consumption of air conditioning and operating cost of the data center can be significantly reduced. Racks had more uniform temperature distribution, and the number of rack hot spots has been significantly reduced.