Modular chiller plant design for data centers

• Main Author: Loo, Shen Yeong
• Other Authors: Wong Yew Wah
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/60943
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Data center plays a critical role in today’s world. It is a facility which houses Information Technology (IT) equipment and its associated electronic component and power supply. Due to the redundancy in terms of backup power supply and cooling load provided by a data center, its electricity consumption can be as high as the consumption of a little town. Hence, data center efficiency has become a very important topic in order to reduce overall energy use without compromising quality of service. Oversizing of data centers’ capacity is no news in the industry. Basically, data centers are oversized in two ways, namely IT load capacity, and cooling capacity. In this report, the author studies the feasibility of a modular chiller plant for a data center. The purpose of a modular chiller plant seeks to reduce and prevent oversizing of a data center from the cooling point of view. Furthermore, the modular chiller plant allows scalability and flexibility for a data center in future expansion. Apart from the feasibility of the chiller plant, the report presents parametric study on the Cooling System Efficiency, measured in energy consumption in kW, per refrigerant ton (RT) provided by the modular chiller plant under different operation scheme. With the use of EnergyPlus, a powerful energy simulation software, the author studies the system efficiency of the modular chiller plant under three different plant loadings, which are sequential distribution loading, uniform distribution loading, and optimal distribution loading. The results show that the modular chiller plant is able to provide scalability and flexibility to a data center with varying heat load. On top of that, sequential distribution loading is proved to be the best energy efficient operation scheme, which is able to achieve an excellent 0.513-0.570 kW/RT under different loading percentage. The objectives of the project are achieved through literature review, background research online, and simulation done with simulation software. This study has achieved its purpose to study the feasibility of the modular chiller plant design for a data center, as well as study the best operation scheme under different heat loading.