Numerical investigation on cooling performance of phase change assisted direct ventilation system for data center

Traditional data centers often use mechanical cooling systems, leading to high energy consumption and waste of natural cooling resources. Thus, a novel phase change ventilation device that combines natural cooling with phase change storage has been designed to maintain continuous natural cooling of the data center by storing cold energy from the natural cold air using phase change plates (PCPs), and eliminate the reliance on mechanical refrigeration in traditional data centers and achieving energy savings. In this study, the cooling performance of the proposed device is numerically analyzed and the feasibility of the model is verified by experiments, filling the research gap in data centers for this method. Considering main effectors, i.e., the inlet air velocity (IAV), inlet air temperature (IAT), phase change plate thickness (PCPT), phase change temperature (PCT), and thermal conductivity of encapsulation material (TCEM) on the cooling performance of the device. The results show that: (1) Phase change ventilation device can reduce the IAT of 34°C by an average of 2.53 °C within 8 hours. (2) When the IAV increases from 1 m/s to 4 m/s, the average cooling performance of the phase change ventilation device decreases by 62.93%. (3) In the phase change latent heat stage, the temperature difference (TD) of phase change ventilation device decreases almost linearly over time. (4) The significance analysis of orthogonal experiment shows the impact of various factors on the cooling performance of phase change ventilation device as follows: IAV > IAT > PCPT > PCT > TCEM.