Numerical cooling performance evaluation of fan assisted perforations in a raised floor data center
Abstract Raised floors with hot aisle/cold aisle configurations have grown to be a critical arrangement for data center cooling. However, more sophisticated techniques are still desired to achieve proper thermal management for improving energy effectiveness and efficiency. The application of fan assisted perforations may yield a smarter cooling solution accommodating non uniform power densities and heat load demands to optimize the cooling performance in raised floor data centers. The present research includes the construction and thermal analysis of a basic raised floor with compact fan assisted perforations modeled using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) The flow straightening effect of the fan assisted tile and the fan to tile distance were treated as the critical design aspects under investigation. The field cooling performance affected by the parametric variation were carefully discussed and compared. Moreover, a full factorial design was employed to obtain and verify the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the main and interaction effects of the design variation. Well constructed fan assisted perforations may satisfy an advanced cooling solution to better manage and optimize the heat and mass transfer in data centers.