New thermal architecture for future green data centres

It is now admitted that electrical power devoted to telecommunication industry will grow tremendously with the development of internet services. In a data centre, most of the energy supplied to the IT equipments is converted into heat and diffused in a closed volume. The energy losses through the walls are negligible, even in winter. To compensate the energy balance, an air conditioning system must be used to transfer heat power at least equal to the total equipments power. The use of free cooling can be an easy way to reduce the energy consumption. Furthermore, if the building construction is adapted (thermal inertia, thickness of the walls, flow rate...), an optimization is possible by using a night cool storage directly in the masonry. Previous studies related to small buildings have shown good results. This paper describes an experimental study in order to define new conceptions of optimized telecommunication buildings.