Comparative analysis of widely used air containment systems in commercial data centers for maximum cooling performance

Many data centers implement containment systems to improve cooling system performance. Literature review shows that Hot Aisle Containment System (HACS) have higher supply air temperature set point than Cold Aisle Containment Systems (CACS) [1]. CACS in data centers have claims to support higher density loads when compared to HACS systems. Data center owners suggest that containment of a group of racks can be a very effective technique to improve cooling performance. On the other hand, others suggest that fewer area for containment is better than no containment in data centers that favours the partially contained architectures of HACS and CACS.The optimum containment architecture in terms of cooling and saving power is becoming imperative for every data center nowadays.;In this study, a data center from published literature is modeled in a commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool and simulation results of this model are validated with the published paper. The data center is a hot aisle/cold aisle raised floor data center. Cooling is provided with one computer room air conditioning (CRAC) unit to the data center room. The raised floor data center is implemented with various containment architectures ranging from partial containment to full containment of racks. There are eight configurations that are compared in terms of fan power and Inlet supply temperature for the servers. The objective of this study is to compare the cooling performances for these eight cases and determine the reasons behind them and also come up with new guidelines for the data center owners.