Impact of aisle containment on energy performance of a data center when using an integrated water-side economizer

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of cold aisle containment on the thermal management performance of a data center, as well as on the amount of energy consumed for cooling. The thermal management performance of the aisle containment architecture, which has been widely employed throughout the data center industry, is demonstrated by experiment. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling strategy is used for the containment air leakage prediction validated by experiments. The thermal management performance of an uncontained and contained aisles are compared through CFD simulation. In addition, since the containment's energy performance is maximized when an economizer is incorporated, a model-based simulation of the annual cooling energy consumption of a modular data center with an integrated water-side economizer is conducted. The simulation results show that the thermal management performance is excellent in both architectures with an appropriate cooling system control, but the energy savings are much greater with the contained architecture.