Data centers are being considered as significant consumers of the world electricity consumption. The energy utilization in data centers is increasing every year and an enormous amount of the electricity is used to cool servers. The common cooling system which is used in Sheikh Bahaei National High-Performance Computing Center is called raised floor and is based on ventilating the entire area of a data center in order to keep servers cool. High energy consumption is one of the disadvantages of this kind of cooling system. The other one is that in the raised floor cooling systems, cool air bypasses the rack and mixes with hot air. This phenomenon increases the temperature of the inlet air to servers and its result is a reduction of electronic component’s lifetime. The purpose of this thesis is to design a channel on the cool air inlet using a numerical procedure in order to avoid the problems that mentioned earlier. To do that openFoam, which is an open source CFD software, is used for the simulation of the flow and heat transfer in a rack. At the first step, a rectangular channel profile has been selected. The percent relative range and standard deviation of cool air distribution between servers of the rack in the selected profile were 89.87 % and 0.04 respectively. In addition to the rectangular channel, some other different channels have been considered and analyzed. The most uniform result for cool air distribution shows the percent relative range and standard deviation 31.7 % and 0.0147 respectively. In order to improve the results, rack’s configuration undergoes some changes. The percent relative range and standard deviation have been obtained 10 % and 0.00462 respectively for the new profile. As the manufacture of the optimum profile which is proposed in this thesis is expensive, another channel has been designed with a simpler profile but less uniformity. This channel is suggested for consumers who care about the charge. Keywords CFD, Rack, Data center, Server, OpenFoam, Simulation, Optimization
