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Cooling technologies in datacom facilities: An overview and perspectives.

Number: 2582

Author(s) : ISAZADEH A., ZIVIANI D., CLARIDGE D. E.

Summary

The demand for data center and network services has been rising rapidly over the last decade. However, the power demand has become stable in recent years, owing to more efficient electronic hardware, migrating to hyperscale and cloud data centers, and more efficient cooling infrastructure, among others. This paper provides a critical overview of cooling technologies and a discussion of research gaps. Cooling technologies in datacom facilities can be broadly categorized into air-cooled and liquid-cooled systems. Overhead/underfloor air delivery, hot/cold aisle layout, and hot/cold aisle containment are the primary strategies used to optimize air cooled system performance. The raised floor architecture has been widely adopted in datacom facilities, but has substantial air flow leakage (about 25–50%). It was found that the optimal ventilation system is a hard floor design with overhead cold air delivery and hot air return duct instead of room-based supply and return. Cold-aisle containment can better reduce the maximum inlet temperature of the racks and suppress temperature rise during cooling system failure, while hot-aisle containment can provide lower average inlet temperature of the racks with smaller standard deviation and is less affected by air tightness around the servers. As rack power density rises above 10 kW/rack and heat flux beyond 100 kW/cm2, conventional air-cooled systems are not a viable solution for thermal management. Liquid cooling methods like spray cooling, impingement jet, immersion cooling, liquid-cooled micro-channels, and heat pipes are among the emerging technologies to overcome the capacity limitations of air-cooled systems. Pertaining to immersion cooling, transitioning into sub-cooled two-phase flow boiling, enhancing heat transfer by adding micro structures or irregularities to create more nucleation sites and higher heat transfer surface area, and utilizing nanofluids are prominent enhancement strategies gaining attention among scholars. Submerging a power electronics module in a fluid can lead to a thermal resistance of 25% that of an air-cooled system, or 30-50% that of a liquid-cooled system like microchannel or spray cooling. Depending on the existing cooling system, overall heat load, and hot spots, the heat pipe system can serve the data center as a stand-alone unit or in conjunction with an air-cooled system, a so-called hybrid system. Compared to typical air-cooled systems, the hybrid system can lower annual cooling load factor and energy consumption by 37-58% and 20-70%, respectively.

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Pages: 11 p.

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  • Original title: Cooling technologies in datacom facilities: An overview and perspectives.
  • Record ID : 30030781
  • Languages: English
  • Subject: Technology
  • Source: 2022 Purdue Conferences. 19th International Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2022

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