SUMMARY
Sharply increasing power dissipations in microprocessors and telecommunications systems have resulted in significant cooling challenges at the data center facility level. Trends indicate that the room level heat densities will increase from 1000 W/m2 to 3000 W/m2 in the near future, along with a net power demand of upto hundreds of MW. Energy efficient cooling of data centers has emerged as an area of increasing importance in electronics thermal management. One of the lowest cost options for significantly cutting the cooling cost for the data center is an airside economizer. If outside conditions are suitable, the airside economizer introduces the outside air into the data center, making it the primary source for cooling the space and hence a source of nearly zero-cost cooling. Full-scale model of a representative data center was developed, with the arrangement of bringing outside air. Commercially available fluid flow and heat transfer software, FLUENT, was used for all numerical simulation. Four different cities over the world were considered to evaluate the savings over the entire year. Results show a significant saving in chiller energy (upto 70%), and even the possible elimination of the use of chillers for certain months of the year. The required limits of relative humidity can be met at the inlet of the servers for the proposed design, even if the outside air humidity is higher or lower than the allowable limits. The saving in the energy is significant and justifies the infrastructure improvements, such as improved filters and control mechanism for the outside air influx.