Reduced order thermal modeling of data centers via proper orthogonal decomposition: a review

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the available reduced order modeling approaches in the literature for predicting the flow and specially temperature fields inside data centers in terms of the involved design parameters.Design/methodology/approach – This paper begins with a motivation for flow/thermal modeling needs for designing an energy‐efficient thermal management system in data centers. Recent studies on air velocity and temperature field simulations in data centers through computational fluid dynamics/heat transfer (CFD/HT) are reviewed. Meta‐modeling and reduced order modeling are tools to generate accurate and rapid surrogate models for a complex system. These tools, with a focus on low‐dimensional models of turbulent flows are reviewed. Reduced order modeling techniques based on turbulent coherent structures identification, in particular the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) are explained and reviewed in more details. Then, the available approaches for rapid thermal modeling of...