Energy and Exergy Analysis of Modular Data Centers

The data center industry focuses on initiatives to reduce its enormous energy consumption and to minimize its adverse environmental impact. Modular data centers provide considerable operational flexibility in that they are mobile and are manufactured using standard containers. This paper develops steady-state energy and exergy destruction models for modular data centers with the open-source EnergyPlus software package. Three different cooling approaches are examined: direct expansion (DX) cooling, evaporative cooling (direct evaporative cooling, DEC, in this study), and free air cooling (air-side economization in this study). This paper shows that for hot and arid climates like those in the southwestern U.S., augmenting DX cooling with evaporative and free air cooling can result in energy savings of up to 38% and 36%, respectively. This paper also applies exergy analysis to suggest that the Energy Reuse Effectiveness of the data center increases with decreasing ambient (outdoor) temperature and increasing server inlet–outlet temperature difference. Furthermore, simulations indicate that the use of passive cooling techniques (e.g., DEC and free air cooling) decrease data center heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning energy consumption, except in extremely hot and humid climates.

[1]  O. Van Geet.  Trends in Data Center Design - ASHRAE Leads the Way to Large Energy Savings (Presentation) , 2013 .

[2]  Alfonso Ortega,et al.  Optimization of Data Center Cooling Efficiency Using Reduced Order Flow Modeling Within a Flow Network Modeling Approach , 2014 .

[3]  Madhusudan K. Iyengar,et al.  Comparison Between Numerical and Experimental Temperature Distributions in a Small Data Center Test Cell , 2007 .

[4]  Madhusudan K. Iyengar,et al.  Analytical Modeling for Thermodynamic Characterization of Data Center Cooling Systems , 2009 .

[5]  K. Fouladi,et al.  Rapid prediction of exergy destruction in data centers due to airflow mixing , 2016 .

[6]  Jae-Weon Jeong,et al.  Energy saving potential of various air-side economizers in a modular data center , 2015 .

[7]  Hiroshi Endo,et al.  Effect of climatic conditions on energy consumption in direct fresh-air container data centers , 2015, Sustain. Comput. Informatics Syst..

[8]  Jaume Salom,et al.  The location as an energy efficiency and renewable energy supply measure for data centres in Europe , 2015 .

[9]  Bill Tschudi,et al.  ERE: A METRIC FOR MEASURING THE BENEFIT OF REUSE ENERGY FROM A DATA CENTER , 2010 .

[10]  Kourosh Nemati,et al.  Chip to Chiller Experimental Cooling Failure Analysis of Data Centers: The Interaction Between IT and Facility , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology.

[11]  Jae-Weon Jeong,et al.  Optimum supply air temperature ranges of various air-side economizers in a modular data center , 2015 .

[12]  Chao Li,et al.  A quantitative analysis of cooling power in container-based data centers , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC).

[13]  Mahmoud Ibrahim,et al.  Characterization of a Server Thermal Mass Using Experimental Measurements , 2011 .

[14]  B. Sammakia,et al.  Innovative approaches of experimentally guided CFD modeling for data centers , 2015, 2015 31st Thermal Measurement, Modeling & Management Symposium (SEMI-THERM).

[15]  Zhang Hainan,et al.  Free cooling of data centers: A review , 2014 .

[16]  Yogendra Joshi,et al.  Rapid modeling tools for energy analysis of modular data centers , 2016, 2016 15th IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm).