UNCOVERING THE LAYERS naturally viewed as an energy drain that should be operated as little as possible .
One alternative option is to use free cooling when the outside air temperature allows , and as a result minimise the use of a chiller . In the average data centre , chillers represent one of the highest consumers of utility electricity which often results in high operating costs as well as significant environmental concerns due to the increased carbon footprint . Cooling towers , which are widely used to dissipate heat from data centres , can also be used in free cooling mode to bypass the chiller and thus help solve these challenges .
However , open cooling towers can also be a major source of fouling in data centre cooling systems , leading to reduced thermal efficiency , laborious maintenance and risk of equipment failure , in turn leading to increased operational costs . Installing a gasketed heat exchanger as an intermediate is one smart way to both enable free cooling and minimise the risk of fouling , without sacrificing the cooling performance of the system .
Another option is to recover as much heat as possible since most of the electrical energy used in a data centre will be transferred to heat . This ‘ waste heat ’ can be used for numerous applications , only the designer ’ s imagination will set the limits . This concept has been proven in a Danish data centre where Alfa Laval equipment assisted in recovering waste heat from servers and used it to supply heat to a district heating network . This example saved 100,000 MW in energy – or in other words , enough energy to power New York City for nine days .
A sustainable future in immersion cooling ?
Machine Learning and high-computing applications , such as Blockchain technology , use high-density processors . This higher heat density necessitates more efficient cooling strategies .
In many cases , it is no longer enough to simply blow air over the equipment anymore , so the next best option is to use a liquid . The core advantage of liquid cooling over air cooling is that liquid can absorb heat more efficiently – up to www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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