Rack Level Modeling of Air Flow Through Perforated Tile in a Data Center

Arghode, Vaibhav K and Kumar, Pramod and Joshi, Yogendra and Weiss, Thomas and Meyer, Gary (2013) Rack Level Modeling of Air Flow Through Perforated Tile in a Data Center. In: JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PACKAGING, 135 (3).

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Abstract

Effective air flow distribution through perforated tiles is required to efficiently cool servers in a raised floor data center. We present detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of air flow through a perforated tile and its entrance to the adjacent server rack. The realistic geometrical details of the perforated tile, as well as of the rack are included in the model. Generally, models for air flow through perforated tiles specify a step pressure loss across the tile surface, or porous jump model based on the tile porosity. An improvement to this includes a momentum source specification above the tile to simulate the acceleration of the air flow through the pores, or body force model. In both of these models, geometrical details of tile such as pore locations and shapes are not included. More details increase the grid size as well as the computational time. However, the grid refinement can be controlled to achieve balance between the accuracy and computational time. We compared the results from CFD using geometrical resolution with the porous jump and body force model solution as well as with the measured flow field using particle image velocimetry (PIV) experiments. We observe that including tile geometrical details gives better results as compared to elimination of tile geometrical details and specifying physical models across and above the tile surface. A modification to the body force model is also suggested and improved results were achieved.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PACKAGING
Publisher:	ASME
Additional Information:	copyright for this article belongs to ASME
Keywords:	high density rack; perforated tile; air flow distribution; geometrical resolution; porous jump model; body force model
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Mechanical Engineering
Date Deposited:	26 Nov 2013 15:28
Last Modified:	26 Nov 2013 15:28
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/47800

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