Waste Heat Recovery Methods in Data Centers

Bit by bit, data center are becoming densely populated with hardware equipment and as the count is rising, the cooling demands have increased for managing the growing heat in the environment. Datacenterknowledge defines IT infrastructures to be energy transformation devices. Data centers pull in energy; use it to its full potential and discard heat generated through the process. The heat being shed out can be put to some good use, as the new technology findings promote waste heat recovery. Although not all data centers are designed with the heat recovery strategy, but the idea can be implemented later to follow the new concepts. However, reusing waste heat is no new concept and it has proven its capabilities in other facilities.

The trend was first set in 2009 by IBM Switzerland that reused waste heat to convert it into useful heat. The company produced a heat recovery system that works to warm the municipal swimming pool, which is located 58 m away. That’s really great. We’ll be taking this further by adding some practices that can make your data center efficient, too.

Leveraging the temperature

Moving the heat is difficult and to regularly transit, the heat requires sophisticated equipment such as plumbing or insulated ducting rather than the inconvenient electrical cables. The installation might demand a huge investment as the hot water pipes installed from source A to source B can cost up to $600 per linear foot. Now you can calculate the overhead you’ll incur.

In order to respond to the low-temperature issue, many data centers services have implemented heat pumps to raise the temperature of the waste heat. The waste heat that comes out of heat pumps can be moved to a liquid source to transport it conveniently. In addition, it can be used in distinct verticals such as for commercial heating, district heating and so on. To accomplish this particular procedure, highly efficient heat pumps are used and the energy consumed by the heat pumps is combined with the flowing stream of energy to the heat user.

The alte
ative is integrating data center with power plants to grow the competence. Building IT infrastructure near to the power plant can help in numerous ways. If you ask how, it can reduce energy transmission losses and the IT overhead related to this occurrence.

All of this directly turns into a source of income for the data center as it reduces energy wastage and efficiently uses the waste heat. In addition to the financial benefits, it also leads to decreasing carbon footprint. By reusing the waste heat, data centers can save around six thousand metric tons of carbon per year.

The trend has become quite popular worldwide and the technique has been adapted by several SMBs as well. Converting waste resource into practical approach not only benefits the company financially, but also saves the ecosystem and thus, data centers must look into the approach.