Page 30 - Climate Control News magazine April 2023

Data Centres
Evaporative cooling: All year round free air
solution for this sector. The Condair ME evapo- rative humidifier is helping Weatherite reduce cooling system energy consumption for its data centre and telecoms clients by up to 80 per cent. Condair’s evaporative humidifier is providing adiabatic cooling in Weatherite’s innovative Adtec-D free air cooling unit. The Condair ME boosts the cooling capacity of the system, allow- ing the Adtec-D to fully replace the need for mechanical cooling in some applications.
The Adtec-D is a self-contained, modular cool- ing system that can be located either inside or outside of a building. In data hall or telecoms environments, for most of the year it operates in free air cooling mode and uses the outside air alone to cool the internal environment. However, when the outside temperature rises to around 20°C, the Adtec-D switches to adiabatic cooling mode. The incoming air is then passed through the Condair ME, which evaporates water into the fresh air stream, cooling it by up to a further 12°C.
By combining free air and evaporative cool- ing, Weatherite’s Adtec-D has recently been able to fully replace DX mechanical cooling across more than 800 switchgear rooms for a leading UK telecoms service provider. A total of around 1,500 Adtec-D units have been deployed in the project to date. A single legacy 30kW DXi and free air cooling unit was consuming around 71,000kWh annually to maintain the required internal temperature, operating 24/7. The replacement 30kW Adtec-D cooling unit
CONDAIR PTY LTD managing director, Ian Eitzen, looks at how free-air and evaporative cooling systems provide year-round cooling for telecoms and data centres.
Given the huge and ongoing rise in the cost of energy, organisations that are high energy con- sumers, such as data centres and telecoms facilities, are suffering greatly. There has never been a better time for these types of operations to consider more energy efficient cooling alter- natives to DX chillers, such as free air cooling systems. The Australian climate and the warmer than average conditions accepted in these facilities, means this type of cooling strat- egy is perfect for DC and telecoms buildings.
A free-air cooling system uses the outside air to cool the internal environment for most of the year. Then during the hotter months, evapora- tive cooling is also employed to enhance the performance and meet the required cooling load. This strategy has been proven sufficient to meet the needs of Australian data centres and telecoms buildings, even during Australia’s hot- test days recently experienced in 2022.
Most modern data centres are now con- structed using this type of cooling strategy, whenever their operating parameters allow. However, there are still many legacy telecoms and data centre buildings that are using DX
“THE HOT AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE MAKES THIS THE IDEAL COOLING STRATEGY.”
chillers to cool and suffering higher than neces- sary energy bills as a result. Retrofitting a solu- tion into these buildings is of great importance, not only for cost efficiency but for environmen- tal concerns.
As an example of this strategy, Condair has recently been involved in a project to supply the evaporative cooling element of a retrofit
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