Parametric investigation for performance of the active tile in data centers
A well organized active tile system in raised floor configuration will be designed to locally accommodate specific higher cooling demands and to provide an energy efficient methodology to better thermal management and control of data centers. Previous research has successfully demonstrated active tile models embedded within a basic hot/cold aisle data center. Here, the concept of single fan units placed in the under floor plenum has been explored as a design prototype. The performance of the active tile was carefully examined using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. The numerical trends were observed to investigate the efficiencies of cooling air being driven through the active tiles. The corresponding significant operating conditions (e.g. fan swirl speed, fan volume flow rate, and static pressure) were evaluated and the critical flow and thermal characteristics (e.g. flow distribution in the plenum and server inlet temperature) affected by the parametric variations were consequently revealed and discussed.
2016 15th IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm)