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Data Centres
What are Data Centres?
Data centres house and manage large amounts of IT infrastructure, including servers, storage systems, and networking equipment. These systems generate large amounts of heat, making effective cooling essential to ensure operational efficiency, reliability, equipment longevity and safety. As data centres continue to grow in size and complexity, advancements in cooling technologies and strategies will be essential in meeting the demands of modern IT infrastructure.
Control valves, plate heat exchangers, pumps and pressurisation units are critical components of data centre cooling systems, each playing a unique role in managing heat and ensuring reliable operation.
Cooling in Data Centres
Excessive heat in data centres, can lead to equipment failure, reduced efficiency, and shortened lifespan of data centre components. Therefore, managing the temperature is crucial to maintaining uptime and performance. There are a variety of cooling methods, including:
Air Cooling
Air cooling involves using air as the medium to remove heat. Common approaches include:
Hot Aisle/ Cold Aisle Configuration: Servers are arranged in rows with alternating aisles - one hot and one cold. Cool air is directed into the cold aisles to be drawn into the servers, while hot air is exhausted into hot aisles and removed from the data centre.
In-Row Cooling: Cooling units are placed between server racks to provide local cooling.
Raised Floor Systems: Cool air is delivered through perforated tiles on a raised floor, with hot air being expended above.
Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling is more efficient than air cooling, especially for high-density data centres and includes:
Chilled Water Systems: Chilled water is circulated through heat exchangers, removing heat from the servers.
Direct-To-Chip Cooling: Liquid coolants are directly applied to the heat-generating components, such as CPUs and GPUs.
Control Valves
Control valves regulate the flow of coolant (air or liquid) to maintain optimal temperatures within the data centre. They are critical in managing the precise delivery of cooling based on demand.
The types of control valves you can use include:
Modulating Valves
Modulating valves: Adjust flow rates continuously to maintain set temperature points.
Data centres generate immense heat, requiring a robust and highly efficient cooling system to manage temperatures effectively. To handle the increased cooling demands, larger-than-standard control valves are essential for modulating the cooling water.
At Valveforce, we recommend and supply the Clorius 3-way Control Valve, type G3FMT-SL. This three-way control valve, designed with a slide for quarter-turn operation, is perfect for regulating cooling water flow. Its performance becomes especially critical in systems with valve sizes up to 400mm, ensuring optimal temperature control in high-demand environments.
Pressure Independent Control Valves (PICVs)
Pressure independent control valves (PICVs): Maintain a consistent flow regardless of pressure fluctuations, ensuring efficient cooling and energy savings.
In data centres, precise cooling is crucial. PICVs ensure stable water flow by automatically adjusting to pressure changes, delivering consistent cooling performance. This boosts energy efficiency, reduces equipment wear, and simplifies system balancing. PICVs are vital for maintaining reliable and efficient cooling in high-demand data centre environments.
Plate Heat Exchangers
Plate heat exchangers (PHEs) transfer heat between two fluids without mixing them. In data centres, they are often used to separate the cooling loop (e.g., chilled water) from the heat source (e.g., server heat) while transferring heat efficiently. Plate packs consist of multiple thin, corrugated plates that are pressed together to form narrow channels. The fluids flow through alternate channels, allowing heat transfer.
Advantages
High Efficiency: Due to the large surface area of the plates, PHEs provide efficient heat transfer.
Compact Size: Their design allows them to be smaller compared to other heat exchanger types, making them suitable for space-constrained data centres.
Scalability: PHEs can be easily scaled by adding or removing plates, making them adaptable to changing cooling demands.
Pumps
Pumps are essential for circulating coolant (such as chilled water or glycol mixtures) through the data centre cooling system. They ensure that the coolant is delivered efficiently to the heat-generating equipment and then returned to be cooled again.
Types of Pumps
Centrifugal Pumps: Commonly used in chilled water systems due to their ability to handle high flow rates and low-viscosity fluids.
Variable Speed Pumps: These pumps adjust their speed based on real-time cooling demand, providing energy savings by reducing unnecessary pumping.
Redundancy and Reliability: Given the critical nature of cooling, data centres often use redundant pump systems to ensure continuous operation even if one pump fails.
Pressure Units
A pressurisation unit in a data centre plays a crucial role in maintaining an optimal environment for cooling and airflow management.
Benefits
Energy Efficiency: By optimizing airflow and pressure, these units reduce the workload on cooling systems, leading to energy savings.
Extended Equipment Lifespan: Controlling temperature and avoiding overheating helps prolong the life of servers and networking devices.
Contaminant Prevention: Positive pressurization minimizes the ingress of dust and other contaminants, keeping the environment cleaner.
In data centres, where cooling is a priority for operational efficiency, pressurisation units contribute significantly to the stability and reliability of the environment.
Key Functions
Air Pressure Control: The unit helps maintain a slight positive pressure in the data centre room, ensuring that external contaminants (dust, pollutants, etc.) do not enter the space. This helps protect sensitive electronic equipment from environmental damage.
Airflow Management: It ensures that the right amount of airflow is maintained across the data centre’s hot and cold aisles, optimizing cooling efficiency by preventing hot air from mixing with cold air.
Cooling Optimisation: Pressurisation units often work alongside HVAC systems and Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) or Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) units to regulate temperature. Proper pressurization improves the efficiency of these systems.
Air Distribution: The unit ensures even distribution of cool air to prevent hotspots within the data centre, especially in high-density zones where servers generate the most heat.
Redundancy and Reliability: In modern data centres, pressurisation units are part of the overall cooling strategy to ensure uptime and reduce the risk of failures, even during equipment malfunction or high workloads.
Efficiency and Environmental Considerations
Efficiency Considerations
Energy usage: Cooling accounts for a significant portion of a data centre’s energy consumption. Efficient cooling designs and equipment (like control valves, plate heat exchangers, and pumps) can help reduce overall energy use.
Advanced cooling technologies: Innovations like liquid immersion cooling, where servers are submerged in a non-conductive liquid, and the use of AI for real-time cooling optimization, are becoming more prevalent.
Efficiency Considerations
Sustainable Practices: Data centres are increasingly focused on reducing their environmental footprint by using renewable energy sources, optimising cooling systems for energy efficiency, and employing heat reuse strategies where waste heat is captured and utilized for other purposes.