Measurement of Perforated Tile Airflow in Data Centers.

The cooling performance of a raised-floor data center is dominated by its ability to deliver adequate cooling airflow to IT equipment through perforated tiles. Although many studies have focused on the design of plenum systems and the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict tile airflow rates, very little has been published regarding accurately measuring airflow in existing facilities. We investigate the ability of a commercially available passive flow hood to accurately measure data center tile airflow and find that the built-in back pressure compensation functionality does not workwell. Further, two previously proposed correction methods for data center applications provide reasonable accuracy when applied to fairly restrictive tiles, but are inaccurate for large-open-area tiles. As a solution, we propose a new family of semiempirical two-measurement correction methods for passive flow hoods. Additionally, we construct a high-accuracy powered flow hood (PFH) to validate all of the passivehood methods. The existing and proposed methods are evaluated against bothCFDsimulations and measurements made in an actual data center. The correction method proposed in and recommended by this study yields the highest accuracy-- less than 5% error for scenarios considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]