High-pressure system case study
Data center humidification and cooling
DriSteem system reclaims water from air handlers while it humidifies and cools a data center
RESULTS
" Maintains constant minimum humidity levels in a 130,000-square-foot server room with 35-foot ceilings
" Reduces the building's cooling load by over 200 tons at peak demand
" Reprocesses drain water from air handlers while producing no wastewater
GUARANTEED SITE CONDITIONS
This data center* provides colocation services,
where tenants pay for space and bandwidth and are guaranteed uninterrupted service and site conditions for their servers.
Aside from security, two of the most critical site conditions are temperature and humidity. How critical? So critical that tenants log temperature and humidity data in their server rows and may submit backcharges for hours or days when conditions are out of range, even if they did not lose data or connectivity.
INCOMING WATER IS COLD, CUSTOMERS WANTS ZERO WASTE
Because heat from the air
The server room's enormous breadth and high ceiling present over 4.5 million is used for evaporation,
cubic feet of indoor air that must meet guaranteed site conditions. This is accomplished high-pressure systems cool with 21 air handlers eleven on the rooftop and ten indoors. The rooftop air handlers,
which do not include humidification, have economizers configured for 100 percent the air while humidifying.
outdoor air at 55 °F. Outdoor temperatures at the data center location average 74 °F
in the summer and 44 °F in the winter. The ten indoor air handlers circulate indoor air year round at a variable volume from 15,000 to 60,000 cubic feet per minute.
The data center facility design team contacted Larry Bovich at Mechanical Technologies, DriSteem's rep for New
York and New Jersey, with a challenge. Given a ten- by thirteen-foot cross section in each of four indoor air handlers,
maintain minimum humidity levels in the data center year round with the following conditions:
" using 40 °F municipal water,
" with an atomizing system that will also provide evaporative cooling to offset server heat,
" at separately staged, 55 °F dispersion locations a short distance upstream from mist eliminators,
" while reclaiming and re-processing atomized water that does not evaporate in the air handlers,
" all while communicating with the building management system via Modbus.
The challenge was accepted! "Their facility size, which is over two and half football fields, was not a problem for us,
nor was the cooling requirement," recalls DriSteem senior application engineer Dave Schwaller. "Of greater concern was the limited evaporation distance in a cool airstream, which is not ideal for evaporation efficiency." Another
* The company name is withheld by request for security reasons.
