Parametric study of raised-floor data centres to improve the cooling efficiency

Advancement in IT technology and the increasing demand in the information and storage requirements have led to the increase of hardware densities, causing a significant cooling challenge in a data centre operation. Establishing the temperature and airflow pattern for a typical data centre with hot and cold aisles is essential for the thermal management. In this study, thermal analysis of a raised- floor data centre was evaluated for which the numerical modeling was performed with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Factors that contribute to an ideal data centre design were studied. To further understand the capability of each design, some investigations were conducted separately to observe their individual impacts on the overall data centre performance. To accomplish this, a self-customized data centre was constructed as a main domain where all investigations will be performed. Various design solutions to reduce the energy consumption and cost in the data centre were proposed based on the findings obtained from all investigations.