Thermal Management Issues in Operational Data Centers: Computational Fluid Dynamics Analysis and Experimental Study

Abstract

The increase in the number of data centers in the last decade, combined with higher power density racks, has led to a significant increase in the associated total electricity consumption, which is compounded by cooling inefficiencies. Issues, such as hot air recirculation in the data center room environment, provide substantial challenges in thermal manageability. Three operational data centers have been studied to identify the cooling issues. Field measurements of temperature were obtained and were compared to numerical simulations to evaluate the overall thermal behavior of the data centers and to identify the thermal issues.