A New Tile Model for Air Flow Distribution in a Full-Featured Data Center with Raised Floor Plenum

Many tile modeling studies have been proposed in the past, among which the most popular were body-force based models. Body force-based models applied a momentum source to simulate the effect of exiting jet of a perforated tile. Such imaginary momentum source terms would also add pressure to the system which does not exist in reality. In a circuit analogy of the fluid flow system, the pressure loss of perforated tiles is the resistance of the system. The change of pressure loss in the system inevitably changes the flow rate distribution on perforated tiles. However, most of past studies neglected the raised floor plenum in their models. The flow rate of perforated tiles was prescribed as a boundary condition. Consequently, the pressure changes due to the imaginary momentum source did not affect the flow rate on tiles. The additional pressure added by the source term needs to be offset if the plenum is modeled. This paper presents an improved Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model for perforated tile in a data center with raised floor plenum. In this paper, a pressure compensated body force model was proposed and examined for perforated tiles in a full-featured data center laboratory at operating conditions. The air flows predicted by the new model was compared with experimental measurement with good agreement. The model’s effectiveness in predicting tile air flow distribution in the data center is demonstrated and analyzed.