Conditioned Air Flow Coordination in Data Centers: Arrangements and Simulation With CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Roberto Egon Heinrich, Cláudio Rodrigo Torres

Abstract

Data Centers are defined as mission critical environments that are progressively demanding more power density due to the consolidation of solutions and services and also the strong growth of virtualized operations and/or cloud services. The power consumption with energy sustainability or energy efficiency is the main concern of the modern Data Center managers. After the ITC (Information Technology and Communication) assets, the energy consumption of the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems is the bigger one. This highlights the Data Center HVAC systems for the improvement of efficient engineering technical solutions. This work presents a technical and pragmatic view of recommendations for the main factors that must to be considered by the designers and owners of these systems, making easier the best technical choice for the optimization of cooled air closed circuit among  the thermal load sources of the environment (ITC assets) and the HVAC devices. The focus is the set of equipment and accessories utilized for the transportation and orientation of the air flow along the referred circuit. The main solutions regularly found in the market were simulated in association with the common problem conditions, in a consistent way with the best practices nowadays in use, showing the results of each solution through the related CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation, justifying the proposition. This information allows to identify the current scenery of a facility and get orientation for an implementation decision making.