Contribution of Heat Pipe to the Energy Conservation of Data Center and Cloud Computers

With the current increase of the electrical power consumption of the data center imposed a great concern in the world about sustainable energy and global warming and it is therefore required innovative ideas to conserve the energy consumption. Authors propose the use of heat pipe which is a best known passive heat transfer device that is well suitable apply for energy saving system in the current data center cooling system. In this paper, a design and economics of the novel type of thermal control system for data center cooling using heat pipe based cold energy storage system has been proposed and discussed. The cold water storage system is explained and sized for data center with heat output capacity of 8,800 kW. Basically, the cold energy storage will help to downsize the chiller and decrease its runtime that will save electricity related cost and decrease green house gases emissions resulting from the electricity generation. The proposed cold energy storage system can be retrofit or connected in the existing data center facilities without major design changes. Water based cold energy storage system provides more compact size with short term storage (hours to days) and is potential for both small to large size data center with yearly average temperature below the cold storage water temperature (∼ 25 °C). The cold water storage system is sized on the basis of metrological conditions in North America, USA. As an outcome of the thermal and cost analysis, an optimum size of cold energy storage system should be designed to handle 60% of the yearly data center load. The proposed system can be easily integrated into the existing conventional systems without any significant infrastructure changes. Preliminary results obtained from the experimental system design to test the ice formation potential of the heat pipe based cold energy storage system has been shown good result and validated the proposed concept.