Strategies for efffective use of exergy-based modeling of data center thermal management systems

As power densities in data centers quickly increase, the inefficiencies of yesterday are becoming costly data center thermal management problems today. One proposed method to address the inefficiencies of state-of-the-art data centers is to use the concept of exergy. To this end, a finite-volume, uniform-flow computer model has been previously developed. For this exergy-based program to be a useful engineering tool, it should: i) be easy to set up, viz. establish grid size and impose system parameters; ii) have a formulation that is solvable and numerically stable; iii) be executable in reasonable time on a workstation machine with typical processor speed and memory; and iv) model the physics with acceptable accuracy. This work demonstrates that with optimally chosen computational strategies, such an exergy-based program can indeed be used as a useful engineering tool for evaluating the thermal performance of a data center.