58728 - Study of Cfd-Based Raised-Floor Data Center Cooling With Parametric Crac Blower Airflow Patterns 

Commonly encountered thermal management challenges of today’s rapidly changing power density, raised-floor hot/cold aisle data centers include typically uncontrollable tile flow non-uniformity along the above-floor cold aisle. For example, the cooling provision intensity on the near-Computer Room Airflow Conditioner (CRAC) unit can be far less than that on the other side (far away from the CRAC unit). This undesired trend leads to unbalanced aisle-level air cooling and inefficient power consumptions of data centers. In this study, the CRAC blower flow boundary conditions as well as their development physics, were under variation and investigation, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based simulations were employed to describe and evaluate the differently configured CRAC blower flow (i.e., normal, angled, and sheared CRAC flow patterns) as well as their impacts upon the air cooling performance optimization. The results of this work indicate that the considered blower boundary condition, together with their underlying development modes within the plenum, might contribute an important influence towards the flow structure in adjacent to the tile perforations. In particular, it was found that the sheared CRAC blower airflow pattern is capable of giving rise to favorable straightening manners, through which the consequently obtained aisle-level air cooling effectiveness and efficiencies might yield an improvement, for both the present research and future more advanced data center thermal management.