Strategies for effective use of exergy-based modeling of data center thermal management systems

As power densities in data centers quickly increase, the inefficiencies of yesterday are becoming costly data center thermal management problems today. One proposed method to address the inefficiencies of state-of-the-art data centers is to use the concept of exergy. To this end, earlier investigations have used a finite-volume, uniform-flow computer model to analyze exergy destruction as a means of identifying inefficiencies. For this type of exergy-based program to be a useful engineering tool, it should: (i) be easy to set up, viz. establish grid size and impose system parameters; (ii) have a formulation that is solvable and numerically stable; (iii) be executable in reasonable time on a workstation machine with typical processor speed and memory; and (iv) model the physics with acceptable accuracy. This investigation explored specific strategies for achieving these features. This work demonstrates that optimally chosen computational strategies do enhance the usefulness of an exergy-based analysis program as an engineering tool for evaluating the thermal performance of a data center.