1. Cryogenic polygeneration for green data centre
- Author
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Alessandro Romagnoli, Jia Yin Sze, Fadhel Ayachi, and Lizhong Yang
- Subjects
Exergy ,business.industry ,020209 energy ,Context (language use) ,Cloud computing ,02 engineering and technology ,Grid ,Peak demand ,Power usage effectiveness ,Backup ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Environmental science ,Data center ,business ,Process engineering - Abstract
Data centres are heavily entrenched in our everyday lives since they are an essential element of the web/cloud based economy. In fact, as the demand for data processing and warehousing is increasingly growing, data centres are subjected to deep scrutiny due to their high-energy consumptions and costs. In addition, the impact of data centres is worsened by the use of polluting diesel generators to provide backup power, which contributes directly to increase the emission levels of CO 2 and NOx. In that context, the aim of this work is to investigate the performance of a novel zero-emission cryogenic energy system serving a 1MW el data centre; the cryo-system uses liquid Nitrogen for the combined generation of cooling and power during the sudden utility grid events (power outage & peak demand). A steady-state thermodynamic model is developed covering single-stage and multistage designs; the proposed model considers electrical-load-following as the control strategy for the cryo-system and the consumption of liquid Nitrogen as the objective function to be minimized. Exergy analysis is used to assess the irreversibility distribution in the whole system. The results show that the cryogenic polygeneration for data centre leads to promising values of Power Usage Effectiveness. The results also indicate that the multistage process reduces the hourly consumption of liquid Nitrogen of about 30% compared to the single-stage process.
- Published
- 2018
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