Impact of a rotary regenerative heat exchanger on energy efficiency of an air cooled data center

With the rise of acceptable operating temperatures for information technology (IT) equipment, using ambient air has been a growing trend for data centers. In this computational study, a thermal wheel is used as a rotary air-to-air heat exchanger extracting heat from IT equipment and dissipating it to the ambient. The wheel is made of a metallic honeycomb material that enables air to pass through while convectively transferring heat. A computational model has been developed to calculate the volumetric air flow rate required for an assigned cooling load. When the ambient temperature is too high, direct expansion cooling is used as a secondary approach and modeled in building energy usage estimation software, EnergyPlus. The integrated computational model calculates overall power usage effectiveness (PUE) for data centers. Using weather data for a specific location, PUEs for several different climates can be obtained. Even without considering the energy savings that is produced through less air quality and humidity control, for a cooling load of 400 kW, it was found that overall PUE can be as low as 1.10 in Helsinki, Finland and 1.20 in Atlanta, Georgia. The presented model can be used to determine the system performance with varying location, cooling load, and regenerative heat exchanger parameters.