A Design Methodology for Controlling Local Airflow Delivery in Data Centers Using Air Dampers

Optimizing data centers for energy efficiency plays a key role in the successful operation of modern data centers. One important factor is the proper management of airflow. In most air-cooled data centers, the required airflow for cooling of IT equipment is supplied from a raised floor to server racks through perforated tiles. In recent years, different approaches have been implemented to increase the efficiency of air delivery through tiles such as the use of directional tiles, adding understructure scoops or using air dampers [1]. Because the IT load of each rack in the data center is constantly changing due to the processing demands of the IT hardware at a given time, simultaneous manual tuning of the airflow at the panel level is impossible or at least impractical. The amount of airflow delivered to the Cold Aisle Containment (CAC) can be adjusted using Variable Airflow Panels (Dampers) that can be controlled remotely. In this study, a fuzzy control system is designed and optimized to control the open area ratio of air dampers in order to adjust the local airflow rate in the ES2 data center.