Impacts of Perforated Tile Open Areas on Airflow Uniformity and Air Management Performance in a Modular Data Center

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to analyze impacts of perforated tile porosity on airflow uniformity and air management performance (RTI, RCI) in a modular data center. In practice, due to the complexity of airflow in data centers, analyzing the relationship among tile open area, airflow uniformity, and air management performance is challenging during the design phase. While a small tile open area provides more uniform airflow, a large tile open area would be preferred due to decreases in unwanted leakage airflow through seams and fan energy reduction in high density data centers. In this research, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation is conducted on a partially-contained modular data center in order to analyze the relationship while varying open areas from 20 % to 60 % of the tile. In a partially-contained modular data center, the tile with small open area shows more uniform airflow compared to the tile with large open area, while the air management performance is affected by both air temperature and airflow uniformity. Overall, the tile with 40% open area shows both acceptable airflow uniformity and good air management performance.