Improvement of energy efficiency in data centers via flexible humidity control

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.