This was the culmination of my PhD work at Syracuse University; however, I continue to work in this area today. This is an important area of research. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. To put this in perspective…this is enough to support 7.1 million average sized four-person homes!
This electricity consumption requirement is not getting any better with the prevalence of mobile devices and the need for more advanced analytics. The below figure shows why thermal management of IT equipment data centers is important. It shows the heat density (or cooling required) based on when IT products were introduced to the market. The late-1980s saw a processor technology change that provided some relief in thermal needs. Today’s devices, however, have gotten back to requiring advanced thermal solution – both at the IT equipment and at the data center.
My PhD dissertation investigated the practical implementation of so-called thermally aware, energy optimized load placement in air-cooled, raised floor data centers to reduce the overall energy consumption, while maintaining the reliability of the IT equipment. The work takes a systematic approach to modeling the data center’s airflow, thermodynamic and heat transfer characteristics – beginning with simplified, physics-inspired models and eventually developing a high-fidelity, experimentally validated thermo-hydraulic model of the data center’s cooling and power infrastructure. The simplified analysis was able to highlight the importance of considering the trade-off between low air supply temperature and increased airflow rate, as well as the deleterious effect of temperature non-uniformity at the inlet of the racks on the data center’s cooling infrastructure power consumption.
Link to download a copy of my dissertation provided by the Syracuse University MAE Department
Dustin W Demetriou 