The word ‘data centre’ is what almost everyone knows today. Back in the old day we never heard this and we had our data stored in a black removable chip called a memory card. If I remember 4 GB data chip was more than enough to store movies, pictures and songs to listen to.
Looking at the current development, we are utilizing every data for the development by means of data processing to make our lives low resistance. Eventually, this will need a storage device to store the data. Then each company will need their own data device and infrastructure to maintain them and the land as well. This problem is resolved by cloud computing where you can store and access your data on a device before your eye blink.
What is Data Centre?
In a more technical way, Data Centre is a building that contains a group of networked computer servers, electronic panels, and battery setups, typically used by organizations to remotely store, process or distribute large amounts of data.
Why thermal management is important for data centres?
In this modern world information is everything even far more valuable than solid gold or diamonds. Now a day this information is stored in Google Drive, dropbox, mail, servers etc. in another way it is stored in big data centres. If this data-storing device crashes, this will lead to a loss of information. The lost information may be worth the million, billion or worthwhile crucial we never know. The most common reason found is due to overheating of racks and servers due to improper management of the cooling system in the data centres.
What is the application of CFD for thermal management in data centres?
The advantage of CFD is to allow us to visualize the things that we cannot see through our naked eyes. CFD enables us to visualise the airflow in the data centre. Once we determine how air through the proposed cooling system is flowing in the data centre infrastructure, we can make it flow to remove more and more heat from the racks and serves by making needful changes in the flow configurations.
The above picture shows the cooling system arrangement provided to the given data centre loaded with multiple racks, servers and battery setups.
The resultant thermal profile over the system is shown below. The thermal profile over the system is due to the flow of cold air. Better flow distribution means if cold air reaches the heating device it can exchange the heat with them and decrease the temperature in a significant manner. This is al important to observe whether cold air reaches the corner of the data centre room and the age of the flowing air. This is important if the corner contains heating battery devices more specifically in power rooms.
We can compare the different configurations using CFD calculations, which can help us to choose the most effective configuration thereby the operating, cost and saving energy to move ahead with the project installation.