Numerical Simulation And Energy Saving Optimization Of The Thermal Environment In Data Centers

The data center,a repository for centralized processing of data,has been widely used in various fields of the national economy in today's information society.As the IT infrastructure consumes a great deal of power and generates a huge amount of heat,the air-conditioning system in today's data center must be capable of continuously running for 8760 hours in an uninterrupted year.With the wide application and development of intelligent manufacturing,internet plus,internet of things,cloud computing,big data technology,the energy consumption of data center is now booming.According to the developing trend of high energy consumption and high heat density of data center,many scholars have put forward the proposal to reduce energy consumption by developing reasonable ventilation system,natural cold source of free cooling and energy saving air conditioning system and so on.The air distribution systems with separations of cold/hot aisles and cold aisle partition could make more efficient use of the cold energy and show a stable airflow velocity distribution in which the cool air completely separates the hot air.Therefore,the cold aisle partition scheme has been widely used in small and medium data centers.Experimental measurement and CFD numerical simulation method,two common approaches to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the air distribution in data centers,are used to provide the necessary information for energy-saving reconstruction.To investigate the influence of the cold aisle partition on the thermal environment in a data center with different thermal load,experiment and numerical simulation are performed and presented in this paper.A computational fluid dynamics(CFD)method is established,in which the boundary conditions are obtained from the measured results.In addition,a porous jump method is introduced in the CFD model to account for the momentum decay at the air outlet of the rack.After the validation of the CFD model,the thermal environment of the data center is analyzed with differentthermal load and some improvement on the layout of the devices is proposed.