Improvement of energy efficiency in data centers via flexible humidity control

Yulia Berezovskaya, Arash Mousavi, Valeriy Vyatkin, Xiaojing Zhang, Tor Björn Minde

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The main goal of climate control systems in data centres is to keep the temperature and humidity in a suitable level for computational devices. Therefore, cooling and humidification systems are essential parts of every Building Automation System (BAS), which is utilized in server rooms. Although the current climate control systems ensure appropriate thermal conditions to computational nodes such as servers, they waste substantial amount of energy. The main cause of this inefficiency is that the current climate control systems, which are responsible for thermal management of the data centres, follow rigid control strategies that maintain constant thermal conditions irrespective of climate changes caused by various computational loads in the plant. To address this issue, in our previous works we proposed a method of optimizing energy consumption in data centre cooling systems while maintaining an acceptable level of thermal comfort for CPUs in the server room. In this paper, we present the enhancement of our previous method by incorporating humidity control into it. The enhanced method consists of a thermal model of server room, and a simulation tool to find an energy efficient control strategy for the climate control system in different situations by comparing different control strategies. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been investigated via simulation and the result, which shows 41.5% reduction in total energy consumption is presented.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Industrial Electronics Society, IECON 2016
PublisherIEEE
Pages5585-5590
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-5090-3474-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Dec 2016
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventAnnual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society - Florence, Italy
Duration: 24 Oct 201627 Oct 2016
Conference number: 42

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
PublisherIEEE
ISSN (Print)1553-572X

Conference

ConferenceAnnual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
Abbreviated titleIECON
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period24/10/201627/10/2016

Keywords

  • Building automation
  • Climate control
  • Cooling system
  • Data centre automation
  • Energy efficiency
  • Humidification
  • Thermal model

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