Paper Conference

Proceedings of SimBuild Conference 2010: 4th conference of IBPSA-USA

     

CFD Simulation Enhances the Optimization of a Data Center's Expansion Process

Gang Tan, Kevin S. Venerable
Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY
IT Division, Data Centers, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY

Abstract: Data center's design is required to be flexible and easily upgradeable to satisfy the technology and functional changes. However, the future functional performance of an expansion process can quickly become unmanageable because of the complexity of data centers. A case study for an institutional data center is presented in this paper, including energy consumption benchmark and monitoring of temperature distribution. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is used to simulate the thermal environment in the data center and the results are compared against the measurement data. Two expansion considerations have been investigated by the CFD modeling in order to predict the data center's indoor thermal environment with the expansion and thus the inappropriate proposes can be filtered out.
Pages: 506 - 513
Paper:
simbuild2010_TS10A-03-Tan