Investigation of Airflow Pattern of a Typical Data Center by CFD Simulation

Abstract Airflow pattern in a data center impacts the cooling effectiveness of the air-conditioning systems significantly, and hence impacts the energy efficiency of the whole data center. This paper presented investigation of the airflow pattern for a typical data center by CFD simulation. An under-floor air supplying system was used in the targeted data center. Cooling performance of the original and three more modified airflow pattern was simulated by CFD software. In optimizing the cooling efficiency, the measurements including blanking of the unused rack space, adding vertical partitions, and partly enclosing cold aisles were adopted to modify the original airflow pattern. The cooling performance was compared by indices like Supply Heat Index (SHI), Return Heat Index (RHI), Rack Cooling Index (RCI) and Return Temperature Index (RTI). The results indicated that partly enclosing cold aisles got most significant improvement in cooling performance. The supply air temperature could be increased by 3 °C. While for the index itself, RTI was found not appropriate in evaluating of cold air by-pass or hot air re-circulation in some cases.