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CFD
Marrying CFD
with real-time
monitoring
By Dave Wolfenden, MD,
Heatload
www.heatload.co.uk
The rise of computational fluid
dynamics has dramatically
improved efficiency by modelling
airflow to optimise cooling
Power and cooling is for many data centre owners, their
biggest operational expenditure cost. It’s not just the
physical cost of the energy that impacts Opex it’s the
increasing cost of emission taxes that are being applied to
data centres.
To help improve efficiency, data centre owners have
turned to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model
airflow in order to optimise cooling. While the science
behind CFD makes it ideal for modelling data centres, it can
quickly become outdated as workloads change. To solve this
problem models must be verified and use real-time data to
stay valid.
CFD is used in a wide variety of industries to understand
fluid flows. Complex algorithms and analysis show how a
fluid, in this case air, moves. This has made it important to
industries such as aerospace and automotive as they look to
improve aerodynamics. Racing teams at major motor races
use CFD to see how effective the new parts are on a car in
the early practice sessions. While those same parts will have
already been modelled and tested in a wind tunnel, the realtime race data is used to tune the models.
On its own, CFD is not enough. It’s akin to creating
a new aerodynamic part for a motor racing team then
bolting it to the car hoping that it will deliver a race winning
performance. While it may deliver some benefits, they will be
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