Air flow management is the most important factor in achieving good data centre cooling operation
A CFD report will give you insight to avoid and resolve issues such as hot spots and inefficient operation of cooling equipment. Good air flow management is challenging because you can’t see air flow patterns. We found that many data centers had 3-4 times more cooling capacity than required. Cooling issues are not uncommon.
As rack heat loads increase, having CFD airflow insights you would be confident that you are taking the right steps to achieve fully optimized cooling economically. Understanding air flow patterns is critical and are unique in every data center. Air flow modelling using Computational Fluid Dynamics software (CFD) is an effective way to highlight problem areas and to identify the measures needed to improve air flow and cooling effectiveness.
Air flow patterns are determined by many conditions, such as layout of cooling and IT equipment, distribution of racks, rack heat loads, and architectural elements of the data centre. CFD modelling is used to illustrate and assess the air flow patterns to determine what action is needed. And those measures can be modeled to determine if they are appropriate. Air flow does not follow logic – what you think may happen may not actually be the case because of the many influencing factors.
Advanced Airfrow Insights
By doing air flow modelling using CFD software, the current state of air flow conditions can be established. Using this baseline model, changes such as perforated tile layout, placement of cooling units, level of operating cooling, aisle containment or architectural changes, such as adding a dropped ceiling, can be tested before significant investment is made only to realize the expected results are not achieved.
