A Compact Cooling-System Model for Transient Data Center Simulations

The ability to accurately model transient events is a key consideration in the design and operation of reliable and resilient data centers. While a standard compact transient model exists for IT-equipment thermal mass and transient building-envelope models are well known, there are no existing true “black-box” modeling techniques for data center cooling systems. We propose such a compact model which can be incorporated into simple flow-network and detailed CFD models alike. The model idealizes the cooling system as a heat exchanger in series with additional mass. For most data center applications, a “quasi-steady-state” model is sufficient for the heat exchanger portion; however, we also propose a numerical (discretized) approach which may be employed for the complete range of data center (and other) applications. Finally, we perform transient measurements on a small-scale heat exchanger in order to validate the model.