Experimental and numerical dynamic investigation of an energy efficient liquid cooled chiller-less data center test facility

Abstract Data centers cooling systems constitute a large portion of the total data center energy consumption, therefore, many new cooling technologies have been developed to improve the energy efficiency. A data center cooling facility proposed by IBM is constructed to reduce cooling energy use to less than 5% of the total Information Technology energy use through a combination of warm water cooling servers and liquid-side economization. In this work, several experimental tests are conducted on this cooling test facility and the results are reported and analyzed. The detailed dynamic responses of each component used in the cooling infrastructure design are investigated using the test results combined with simulation results. The experimental tests designed and the corresponding analyses present a brief understanding of the dynamic performance of this data center test facility, including both inside and outside of the computer room. A transient effectiveness method is introduced and used to analyze the heat exchangers performance. The work presented provides an analyzing method which can be used to investigate and characterize the transient performance of heat exchangers which are working in the cooling and heating systems with multiple coupled heat transfer loops, in which multiple heat exchanger units are used.