CFD Investigation of Airflow Management in a Small Container Data Center

In this paper, the cooling performance of a small container data center is numerically investigated. It is indicated that adjusting the plenum depth and placing baffles in the plenum can improve the airflow uniformity efficiently. On the other hand, the perforated tiles with low porosity of 25% also can significantly improve the air flowrate distribution by 88.9% with the severe pumping power penalty of 2.79 times. Hence, the layout of perforated tiles with nonuniform porosities is optimized with the fixed average porosity of 50%, which can obtain almost absolutely uniform flowrate distribution in the cold aisle. In addition, the cold aisle containment (CAC) strategy is implemented, resulting in the improved rack cooling index (RCI) and supply heat index (SHI) to approach to 100% and 0%, respectively. However, the intake flowrates still suffer from nonuniformity due to the bypass effect, thus a novel criterion named flowrate uniformity index (FUI) is proposed. Besides, the drawer-type layouts with the shifting distance ( delta ) varying from 0 to 200 mm are investigated, and the case with delta = 150 mm shows the best improvement in terms of the standard deviation of FUI (sigma {mathrm {FUI}}). Moreover, the sigma {mathrm {FUI}} of the case with a three-layer drawer-type layout can be further improved by 45.8%.