Numerical Evaluation of Hot Air Recirculation in Server Rack

Abstract

In air-cooled data centers, hot aisle containment is used to separate hot and cold air from mixing to improve cooling effectiveness. However, this creates a significant pressure imbalance between the cold and hot aisles, with the latter being high. The hot aisle high pressure creates bac pressure that pushes against the server-unit fan system, which subsequently results in hot recirculation and insufficient server-unit cooling. This study examines the application of series-configured server fans with the intention of increasing the system pressure head to overcome the hot aisle containment back pressure and eliminate server hot air recirculation. A detailed computational fluid dynamics model for the Dell 2950 2U server is calibrated and validated using existing experimental test results. Furthermore, the impact of changing the server fan system to a series configuration by adding four or more server fans is investigated under different hot-aisle pressure conditions. It was found that changing the server fan system configuration from parallel to series arrangement positively improved the available system static pressure, but it did not result in the elimination of hot air recirculation. The server with the series-configured fan system experienced an average inlet air temperature increase of 9% when compared to the original server under similar conditions. This study serves as a base for integrating liquid and air-cooling systems to form hybrid cooling systems for high-density racks in legacy data centers.

Keywords

• computational fluid dynamics
• data center
• server
• thermal design power
• hot air recirculation
• back pressure