Management and predictions of operational changes and growth in mission critical facilities
The main challenge in understanding the cooling performance in a legacy data center is the invisible transport medium (air). This emphasizes the need for smart and meticulous measurement techniques. However, the nature of measurements is finite (e.g. top, middle and bottom) and the variation between often non-linear, therefore to capture the gradients between measured points a validated CFD simulation is needed. In this paper a brief description of an experimental characterization of a new data center lab is discussed. Airflow and temperature measurements are utilized to understand the facility's performance at different operational stages, until reaching the designed capacity. Since the facility houses a wide range of different IT equipment (servers, switches, storage and blades), it is important to understand the airflow demand of each. To do that, each type of IT was tested separately and flow characteristics were obtained (i.e. free delivery, critical pressure and flow curves). In the second part, all the characterization data is integrated via compact models into a full CFD simulation. The measured points are used for validation and the full field of air temperature and flow is resolved. Both the measurements and simulation data will now be used to answer important design, deployment and operational change questions.
Experimentally Validated Numerical Model of a Fully-Enclosed Hybrid Cooled Server Cabinet
Because of the rapid growth in the number of data centers combined with the high density heat dissipation in the IT and telecommunications equipment, energy efficient thermal management of data centers has become a key research focus in the electronics packaging community. Traditional legacy data centers still rely largely on chilled air flow delivered to the IT equipment racks through perforated tiles from the raised floor plenum. When there is large variation in the amount of heat dissipated by the racks in a given aisle, the standard air cooling approach requires over-provisioning.Localized hybrid air-water cooling is one approach to more effectively control the cooling when there is wide variation in the amount of dissipation in neighboring racks. In a closed hybrid air-water cooled server cabinet, the generated heat is removed by a self-contained system that does not interact with the room level air cooling system. In this study, a comprehensive procedure for CFD validation in a close coupled hybrid cooled enclosed cabinet is described. The commercial enclosure has been characterized experimentally in an earlier study, where the effectiveness values were applied as boundary conditions to the compact heat exchanger model.Here, the previously obtained experimental data are used to validate the results from computational modeling. Two cases with different air flow rates are compared. Very good agreement is achieved, with the maximum overall average error less than 4%. Due to relatively high pressure inside the cabinet, it is possible that air leakage from the cabinet may be responsible for the discrepancy between the model and experimental results. A sensitivity study was applied to the validated model to investigate the effect leakage had on the cabinet’s performance.Copyright © 2015 by ASME
Simulation and control of hybrid renewable energy system connected to the grid
This paper presents a control and simulation of hybrid renewable energy system connected to the grid. The studied system includes a photovoltaic panel, synchronous permanent magnet generator based wind turbine, and a battery for storage energy. The PV array and wind systems are connected to the common DC bus by a boost converter. The battery is connected by a bi-directional DC/DC converter, and then integrated into the AC utility grid via a common DC/AC inverter. In order to extract the maximum energy, a simulation study has been carried out according to the meteorological conditions (wind speed and variable solar irradiance) while maintaining power quality at a satisfactory level. In order to capture the maximum power, a MPPT algorithm is applied for both wind turbine and photovoltaic panel. The modeling and simulation of the whole system has been performed under Matlab/Simulink environment. The obtained results show that the current and the voltage of grid side are sinusoidal and alternative forms, and the power injected to the grid is around the power produced by the hybrid system.