Thermodynamic Modeling of Data Center Cooling Systems

The Villanova Thermodynamic Analysis of Systems (VTAS) is a flow network tool for modeling the thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer inherent to an entire data center system, including contributions by individual servers, the data center airspace, and the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) components. The framework for the VTAS design simulation involves the coupling of steady-state energy flows between components via a novel loop formulation. Models for all of the main components of the data center are included in VTAS as MATLAB functions. The application of VTAS towards an example legacy air cooled data center show that the largest portions of exergy destruction pertain to the server and room airflow components.Copyright © 2013 by ASME