Graduation Semester and Year

2014

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Dereje Agonafer

Abstract

Due to the doubling of processing power ever so often, designing an efficient thermal management system for database centers is becoming more and more difficult. Two studies have been done, one on air cooling using bigger rack level fans and another in liquid cooling minimizing the size of flow control devices. Fans are one of the most inefficient and power hungry devices used in an air cooled database center. Study has been done to improve the air cooling efficiency using larger rack level fans on 2OU open compute server. Simulations have been done using commercial computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software and power consumption of this rack level fan configuration has been compared with the baseline server level fans. Fan failure scenario is also studied by failing one fans and observing the flow through the servers using CFD. An innovative concept of liquid flow controlling device is introduced for liquid cooling applications. These mini flow control devices (MFCD) use thermostatic bimetallic effect. This mode of flow control is cost effective, scalable, and easy to control by passing current directly through the strip. The advantages and applications of this flow control devices are great. This flow control device is designed and analyzed using theoretical formulas for passive flow control in Dynamic liquid cooling plate. Structural and flow interaction is also simulated by using computational flow dynamics. Six 120mm Rack level fans are advisable for this open compute rack configuration, only if the servers are performing less than 70% of utilization above which we steadily loses the increased in efficiency. Initial cost of 6 fans costs approximately less than half of 30 server level fans. Designed MFCDS can be successfully used in efficient cooling of multi core processors..

Disciplines

Aerospace Engineering | Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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