A Comprehensive CFD Study of Tile Flow Rate Distribution in a Compact Data Center Laboratory

Cooling air in data center is most commonly supplied by Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) units through a raised-floor plenum and is eventually delivered through perforated tiles into the computer room. The flow rate distribution on perforated tiles is crucial to the amount of cooling air delivered to rack units in the cold aisle, which dominates the cooling effect of the entire computer room. Among many factors affecting the flow rate distribution, plenum modeling is one of the most important factors. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools are usually applied to predict the temperature and velocity profile in data centers. However, most of literatures in the past focused on perforated tile modeling and server modeling in the computer room. Plenum was usually intentionally neglected and flow rate on the perforated tiles were specified as boundary conditions. It was also reported [1] that the prediction of the flow rate distribution was difficult. This paper studies the tile flow rate distribution based on CFD simulation. The CFD result was then compared with the result of an experiment taken in Georgia Tech.