CFD modelling of the air conditioning system for a Tier 2 Data Centre

ABSTRACT The management of Air Conditioning Systems (ACS) in Data Centre (DC) facilities has a significant impact not only on energy consumption but also on the performance and safety of the hardware. The main purpose of this work is to detect design and operational flaws of the ACS of a Tier 2 DC located at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) with the aid of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools. To achieve this objective, in situ measurements of air humidity and temperature were taken to develop and validate a CFD model. In addition to the current operation, two different scenarios were proposed, and their performance was evaluated in terms of the global temperature and relative humidity profiles, cooling efficiency with respect to the current operation, and air flow currents. The first scenario contemplated the operation of both AC units at full capacity for a normal 24-hour shift, and the second scenario contemplated an unsteady analysis of the AC’s operation on 12-hour shifts. The CFD and experimental results suggest that the DC’s layout and corridor arrangement have several flaws that cannot be overcome with the current ACS. Moreover, the CFD analysis carried out provides relevant insights into the performance of the operational setups tested.