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Operation Optimization of Liquid Cooling Systems in Data Centers by the Heat Current Method and Artificial Neural Network

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Abstract

Liquid cooling systems in data centers have been attracting more attentions due to its better cooling capability and less energy consumption. In order to propose an effective optimization method for the operation of indirect liquid cooling systems, this paper first constructs an experiment platform and applies the heat current method to build the global heat transfer constraints of the whole system. Particularly, the thermal conductance of each heat exchanger under different working conditions is predicted by the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) trained by the historical data. On this basis, combining the heat transfer and fluid flow constraints together with the Lagrange multiplier method builds the optimization model with the objective of minimum pumping power consumption (PPC), solving which by the solution strategy designed obtains the optimal frequencies of the variable frequency pumps (VFPs). Operating with the optimal and other feasible operating conditions validates the optimization model. Meanwhile, the experiments with variable heat loads and flow resistances provide some guidelines for the optimal system operation. For instance, to address heat load increase of a branch, it needs to increase the frequencies of the VFPs, not only the corresponding hot loop but also the whole cold loop.

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Acknowledgement

The present works are supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51836004 and 51621062) and the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University (No. 32240072064035).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Thermal Science and Power Engineering of Ministry of Education, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Wei Shao, Qun Chen, Kelun He & Mengqi Zhang

  2. Institute of Thermal Science and Technology, Shandong University, Ji’nan, 250061, China

    Wei Shao

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  1. Wei Shao
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  2. Qun Chen
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Correspondence to Qun Chen.

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Shao, W., Chen, Q., He, K. et al. Operation Optimization of Liquid Cooling Systems in Data Centers by the Heat Current Method and Artificial Neural Network. J. Therm. Sci. 29, 1063–1075 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-020-1283-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-020-1283-5

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