Performance of a mixed mode air handling unit for direct liquid-cooled servers

Datacenter energy consumption constitutes a large portion of global energy consumption. Particularly, a large amount of this energy is consumed by the datacenter cooling system. Subsequently, many innovative cooling technologies have been developed to reduce energy consumption and increase cooling performance. In this work, an experimental setup was designed and constructed which comprises a direct liquid-cooled server, rack-level cooling and compressor-free external cooling system. This study tracks the heat generated from IT processes to the environment. In addition, the power usage effectiveness (PUE) and the air handling unit (AHU) performance are investigated. The objectives were studied under different datacenter operation scenarios, and AHU configurations.