Natural Ventilation & Data Centers
Natural Ventilation & Data Centers
Are there any case studies someone can point me to that covers the use of microflo for either natural ventilation or data center cooling? Personal experience would be good as well. I have not been able to find much on these topics. Thanks!
Re: Natural Ventilation & Data Centers
A typical way of modelling the cabinets in a data centre using a general purpose CFD code is to
1) have an outflow boundary condition in the cold aisle that draws air out of the computational domain
2) a inflow boundary condition in the hot aisle which put the same amount of air back into the computational domain
3) to take the average temperature leaving the outflow boundary and add the correct temperature rise for that flow rate to account for the known cabinet load and use that temperature as the inflow temperature for the hot aisle flow boundary
Microflo doesn't have the ability to couple an inflow and outflow boundary condition in this way. You would have to assume the temperature at the inflow (hot aisle) boundary. In the middle of the racks this would be the supply temperature of the CRAC units but at the end of the rack runs there may be significant entrainment of room air which makes the on-cabinet temperature higher than the CRAC supply temperature.
For this reason I wouldn't recommend Microflo for data centre CFD models.
1) have an outflow boundary condition in the cold aisle that draws air out of the computational domain
2) a inflow boundary condition in the hot aisle which put the same amount of air back into the computational domain
3) to take the average temperature leaving the outflow boundary and add the correct temperature rise for that flow rate to account for the known cabinet load and use that temperature as the inflow temperature for the hot aisle flow boundary
Microflo doesn't have the ability to couple an inflow and outflow boundary condition in this way. You would have to assume the temperature at the inflow (hot aisle) boundary. In the middle of the racks this would be the supply temperature of the CRAC units but at the end of the rack runs there may be significant entrainment of room air which makes the on-cabinet temperature higher than the CRAC supply temperature.
For this reason I wouldn't recommend Microflo for data centre CFD models.