Analysis of Anthropogenic Waste Heat Emission from an Academic Data Center

The rapid growth in computing and data transmission has significant energy and environmental implications. While there is considerable interest in waste heat emission and reuse in commercial data centers, opportunities in academic data centers remain largely unexplored. In this study, real-time onsite waste heat data were collected from a typical academic data center and an analysis framework was developed to determine the quality and quantity of waste heat that can be contained for reuse. In the absence of a comprehensive computer room monitoring system, real-time thermal data were collected from the data center using two arrays of thermometers and thermo-anemometers in the server room. Additionally, a computational fluid dynamics model was used to simulate temperature distribution and identify “hot spots” in the server room. By simulating modification of the server room with a hot air containment system, the return air temperature increased from 23 to 46 °C and the annual waste heat energy increased from 377 to 2004 MWh. Our study emphasizes the importance of containing waste heat so that it can be available for reuse, and also, that reusing the waste heat has value in not releasing it to the environment.