A Techno-Economic Analysis of Current Cooling Techniques in Irish Data Centres

This research is part of a comprehensive study to determine reformative actions for cooling regimes within the Irish data centre market. To achieve this goal, preliminary Exergy, Entropy change and operational cost analyses are used. It is determined that there is no clear advantage for using one cooling method over another without knowing the data centres secondary function (e.g. district heating, energy generation). Air cooling technology is a good candidate for a highly reliable system due to the low exhaust temperatures of 30°C. Two-phase immersion is a possibility for economically viable data centres where operational costs are to be minimised, although the capital expenditure could outweigh operational expenditure. Hybrid cooling has a low waste heat rate of 2.569 kJ/s, slightly above the lowest waste heat from the passively cooled two-phase immersion cooling at 2.5 kJ/s. Hybrid cooling benefits from the combination of concentrated hot spot cooling and general air cooling has an Entropy change of 0.009 kJ/K.