Graduation Semester and Year

2018

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Dereje Agonafer

Abstract

Continuous provision of quality supply air to data center’s IT pod room is key parameter in assuring effective data center operation without any down time. Due to number of possible operating conditions and non-linear relations between operating parameters make the working mechanism of data center difficult to optimize energy use. At present industries are using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate thermal behaviour for all types of operating conditions. The focus of this study is to predict Supply Air Temperature using Artificial Neural Network(ANN) which can overcome limitations of CFD such as high cost, need of expertise and large computation time. For developing ANN, input parameters, number of neurons and hidden layers, activation function and the period of training data set were studied. A commercial CFD software package 6sigma room is used to develop a modular data center consisting IT pod room and an air-handling unit. CFD analysis is carried out for different outside air conditions. Historical weather data of 1 year was considered as an input for CFD analysis. The ANN model is “trained” using data generated from these CFD results. The predictions of ANN model and the results of CFD analysis for a set of example scenarios were compared to measure the agreement between the two. The results show that the ANN model predicts much faster than full computational fluid dynamics simulations with good prediction accuracy. This demonstrates that ANN is an effective way for predicting the performance of an air-handling unit.

Keywords

Data center cooling, Computational fluid dynamics, Artificial neural networks, NARX, 6SigmaRoom

Disciplines

Aerospace Engineering | Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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