Factors that affect the performance characteristics of wet cooling pads for data center applications

Various factors affect performance of evaporative cooling media. Many literature papers report on factors that affect performance of cooling pads that are used in greenhouse and poultry farming applications. There is a lack of literature data that discusses the effect of these factors for data center applications. Currently various types of cooling pads are used in many data centers. This paper addresses the performance characteristics of Cellulose media and Glass-Fibre media. Various parameters that affect the efficiency of the cooling pads include surface area, thickness of pad, size of perforation of the pad, water flow rate, temperature, and relative humidity of inlet air. The experimental analysis includes changing the frontal air velocity and operating different levels of pad saturation to find out how well the pad performs under the above mentioned conditions and how the efficiency of the pad system varies. Results showed that cellulose pads have higher saturation efficiency, wetting characteristics and lesser pressure drop compared to the Glass-Fiber ones. With better cooling performance, cooler air can enter into the data center with minimal expenditure of energy spent for driving chiller and other air-handling units.