A Study of Air Flow through Perforated Tile for Air Conditioning System in Data Center

The power trend of using server systems in data center is continuously increasing. Cooling system consumed 38% of total energy usage which is a significant contribution in the energy consumption. As a result, the efficient energy usage in data center is concerned.Normally a raised-floor is widely used in data center cooling system which delivers cool air through perforated tiles to a front of server racks. However it is usually found that this cool air cannot effectively remove a heat dissipation at the top of server racks. Therefore, the environmental condition in data center must be designed strictly to avoid disruption that caused by overheat.This paper gives some guidelines to help in the better design. Commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program was used to analyze the air flow from raised-floor air conditioning system. A tetrahedral of 1.8 million meshes with k- turbulence model were used to obtain the air flow velocity and temperature distributions in the room. The model was validated by comparing simulation results with actual measurements. As a result, dimensionless parameters in the form of supply heat index(SHI), for understanding the optimization of relative airflow distribution to the heat load of server rack was found. It shows that these parameters provide an effective tool to the improvement of energy efficiency in raised floor data center.