Development and Testing of a Control strategy for dynamic cooling at Rack level in Data centers
Abstract
Cooling is a critical part of data center’s infrastructure, and with ongoing demands in data processing and storage, thermal management issues are of great concern. Some imperative methods of removing heat are either using air or liquid (preferably water or refrigerant). When high power density modules are involved, liquid cooling addresses some of the problems faced by air cooling as liquid coolants have higher thermal capacitance. Also, in the case of multi-chip modules, a non-uniform heating due to multi-core generates hot-spots and increases temperature gradients across the module. A dynamic cold plate along with a self-regulated flow control device was developed to address these issues. A temperature sensing self-regulated flow control device (FCD) is placed at the exit of each section to regulate the required flow. But to implement this at rack level, a good control strategy is required.
This study presents a CFD analysis of such control strategy to save Pumping power on a direct liquid cooled rack using a concept of dynamic cooling along with a self-regulated flow control device. It’s important to save pumping power as it is one of the most energy consumed areas in the data center. The main objective of this study is to assess the flow rate and pressure distribution on the rack in order to control excessive pumping power usage and enhance cooling system efficiency.