Conference Year
2016
Keywords
refrigeration, heat pipe, energy consumption
Abstract
In data center, telco equipment station and some central control rooms, there are some cases with cooling requirement all the year, their temperatures are usually controlled strictly whenever in summer or in winter. Moreover, due to clearness and safety requirement, the chiller should provide cooling water all the time even the outside environment is very cold. There had been some considerations about provide cooling capacity in cold climate with free environmental air by various heat exchangers directly. Without operating chillers, annual energy consumption on temperature control could be decreased. This paper proposed a system combined a chiller with an air-cooled heat exchanger, shown as Fig 1., there is one evaporator to provide cooled water, two condensers for the chiller and the separate type heat pipe alternatively. In warm climate, the chiller operates normally with the compressor and its condenser, the air cooling heat pipe is blocked by switching valves. In cold climate, the system is switched to the no compressor mode, the air-cooler heat exchanger could connect with the evaporator directly, the work pattern follows the separated type heat pipe, the working medium is the refrigerant still, the air cooling heat exchanger serves as the condenser of the separated type heat pipe, therefore, the evaporator is the evaporating part of the separated type heat pipe as well, the cooled water could be delivered through normal pipelines. In application of the combined refrigeration, they operation strategy for refrigeration and the heat pipe should be discussed in different climate zones. Therefore, in this paper we discussed energy consumption for cooling requirement in data center at several typical regions based on the combined cooling system. In different regions, their climates condition are different, the switching between the normal refrigeration and the heat pipe results to various annual energy consumptions.