Experimental characterization of pressure drop in a server rack

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of pressure drop in server racks on the cooling of the IT equipment. The measured impedance curves for servers internal resistance, rack doors, and Cable Management Arms (CMA) are used to estimate the reduction in the cooling airflow rate. In this study, 1 RU and 2 RU servers, and a 9 RU server simulator are used as representative IT equipment. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model is used to investigate the influence of the rack structure on the thermal field. The effect of the cooling air flow rate on the temperature of the server's internal components is also studied experimentally.