Effective Thermal Management of Data Centers Using Efficient Cabinet Designs

Rising heat load trends in data center facilities have raised concerns over energy usage. The environmental protection agency has reported that the energy used in 2006 by data center industry was 1.5% of the total energy usage by entire nation. The experts agree that by year 2010, this usage will approach 2% of the annual energy use nationwide. Although many new concepts such as airside economizers and cogeneration are gaining traction, many data center facilities spend considerable energy in cooling. In this study, various cabinet designs are discussed. Isolating the supplied cold air from hot exhaust air is always a challenge in thermal management of data center facilities. A cabinet design that employs chimney to aid the isolation of hot and cold air is discussed. A computational model of representative data center is created to study the effectiveness of design under various supply air fractions.