Analysis of a district heating system using waste heat in a distributed cooling data center

Abstract With the rapid development of the data center industry, a major source of waste energy is created through the increasing demand for cloud-based connectivity and performance. A recent study demonstrated that data centers are responsible for approximately 1.3% of total global electricity usage. In addition, nearly 40% of this power is consumed by computer room air conditioning (CRAC) systems for cooling the servers, which creates a significant stream of waste heat. The waste heat in a data center has a low quality; therefore, recovery and reuse of the waste eat is a challenge. In this study, a district heating system solution using waste heat in a data center was introduced. A distributed cooling solution was discussed to improve the quality of this waste heat. Then, heat pump technology was used to further raise the quality. The energy-saving effect was theoretically compared with coal-fired heating. A new index PUEwh was defined to evaluate the power utilization effectiveness of the data center with the heat recovery system. This waste heat district heating solution was implemented at a data center in Hohhot, China, and measurements demonstrated that the PUEwh of this data center was 0.13.

[1]  Zhen Li,et al.  Analysis on energy efficiency of an integrated heat pipe system in data centers , 2015 .

[2]  R. F. Sullivan.  Alternating Cold and Hot Aisles Provides More Reliable Cooling for Server Farms , 2000 .

[3]  Andrei G. Fedorov,et al.  An absorption based miniature heat pump system for electronics cooling , 2008 .

[4]  Zhen Li,et al.  Application of separated heat pipe system in data center cooling. , 2016 .

[5]  Yogendra Joshi,et al.  Convective Transport Processes in Data Centers , 2006 .

[6]  Hao Tian,et al.  A combined cooling solution for high heat density data centers using multi-stage heat pipe loops , 2015 .

[7]  T. Jin,et al.  Numerical investigation of a CO2 loop thermosyphon in an integrated air conditioning system for free cooling of data centers , 2017 .

[8]  Guoyuan Ma,et al.  Cooling performance of a pump-driven two phase cooling system for free cooling in data centers , 2016 .

[9]  I. Dincer,et al.  A new approach for predicting cooling degree-hours and energy requirements in buildings , 2011 .

[10]  Sandeep K. S. Gupta,et al.  Thermodynamic feasibility of harvesting data center waste heat to drive an absorption chiller , 2012 .

[11]  S. Patankar.  Airflow and Cooling in a Data Center , 2010 .

[12]  Van P. Carey,et al.  Strategies for effective use of exergy-based modeling of data center thermal management systems , 2008, Microelectron. J..

[13]  Thomas Brunschwiler,et al.  Toward zero-emission data centers through direct reuse of thermal energy , 2009, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[14]  T. Jin,et al.  Experimental and numerical investigation on a CO2 loop thermosyphon for free cooling of data centers , 2017 .

[15]  Madhusudan K. Iyengar,et al.  Challenges of data center thermal management , 2005, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[16]  Jun Yang,et al.  Comparison of overhead and underfloor air delivery systems in a data center environment usinq CFD modeling , 2005 .

[17]  Gerard F. Jones,et al.  A review of data center cooling technology, operating conditions and the corresponding low-grade waste heat recovery opportunities , 2014 .

[18]  Andrei G. Fedorov,et al.  Thermodynamic analysis of an absorption refrigeration system with ionic-liquid/refrigerant mixture as a working fluid , 2012 .

[19]  Xing Zhang,et al.  Study of hot air recirculation and thermal management in data centers by using temperature rise distribution , 2016 .

[20]  Xiaodong Qian,et al.  A thermal environmental analysis method for data centers , 2013 .

[21]  Jackson Braz Marcinichen,et al.  On-chip two-phase cooling of datacenters: Cooling system and energy recovery evaluation , 2012 .

[22]  Graeme Maidment,et al.  Using data centres for combined heating and cooling: An investigation for London , 2016 .