Intake fan implementation to allow high ambient temperatures

Increasing the ambient temperature in Data Center computer rooms (data halls) to 65°C is of interest to operators due to the greatly reduced cost of the cooling, but gives rise to a number of other challenges, not least of which is how hostile the environment is to personnel. Due to the high ambient temperature, the fans are placed at the intake of the rack to prevent them from operating at a temperature that exceeds 70°C. We therefore need to design the fan intake so that it can accommodate a dust filter. The exhaust of the fan is critical as we may otherwise have a large speed variation as the air approaches the card cage. This variation makes it difficult to meet the requirement that any card can be placed in any slot within the rack. The objective of this work is to reduce the pressure drop created by this implementation, the frequency of dust filter maintenance, and to provide relatively uniform and well distributed air flow so that higher power cards can be located in any slot.