Automation of data center airflow and heat transfer analysis for transient scenario
[ 1 ] Wydział Inżynierii Mechanicznej, Politechnika Poznańska | [ 2 ] Instytut Mechaniki Stosowanej, Wydział Inżynierii Mechanicznej, Politechnika Poznańska | [ SzD ] doktorant ze Szkoły Doktorskiej | [ P ] pracownik
2024
rozdział w monografii naukowej / referat
angielski
- CFD
- Data Center
- OpenFOAM
- heat transfer
- cooling efficiency
- automation
EN The global share of energy consumption by data centers has reached the level of several percent and continues to rise. For this reason, ensuring optimal energy efficiency of the cooling process in data centers is an essential matter. As most data centers are air-cooled, it is required to investigate an airflow pattern inside as well as the accompanying heat transfer phenomena to assess the efficiency of the cooling process of the object. What is more, the thermal state of a server room as well as its power consumption often has a transient nature not only due to turbulent airflow inside but also because of dynamically changing servers’ load and time-varying output conditions of the coolers as a consequence of their control algorithms. That is why it is necessary to use transient modeling to get a deep and complete insight into the nature of the airflow and heat transfer phenomena in a server room and the resulting energy usage. A technique which allows modeling of the airflow and heat transfer in a detailed, volumetric way is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Unfortunately, employing CFD for complex models especially in a transient manner can become a tedious process for an engineer and a challenging task for computational resources. In this paper we present a framework which is designed for automatic numerical heat transfer analysis of data center objects, using in the backend OpenFOAM, a well-known open-source CFD toolkit. Besides the automation process, the presented framework includes the implementation of transient models of active server room equipment and modeling of their energy usage as well as support for using high performance computing (HPC) systems equipped with SLURM queuing system. The software description is followed by a presentation of its application for a study of a hypothetical server room. A transient scenario of rapid application of servers’ load is simulated, including an energy consumption analysis of cooling devices.
31.05.2024
522 - 528
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