AT-19-C017 -- A New Fast Fluid Dynamics Model for Data-Center Floor Plenums

A raised-floor plenum is often used to distribute cooling airflow in data centers. Traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) canaccurately model airflow distribution in plenums, but it is expensive (computationally and financially) and is, therefore, often not accessible to the data centerdesigner or operator. This paper presents an alternative CFD methodology based on Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD), which is faster, more parallelizable,and simpler to program. The improvement in computational speed afforded by FFD is particularly important for multiple-iteration optimization, transientsimulations, or applications for which near-real-time performance is required. The potential speed improvements of FFD have been widely documented;however, it has been generally accepted that this benefit is accompanied by a modest loss of accuracy relative to traditional CFD. We show here that this isnot necessarily true. Plenum airflow predictions by our FFD implementation, which utilizes a first-order upwind rather than Semi-Lagrangian advectionscheme of previous research, are extremely close to those predicted by traditional CFD - provided the same turbulence model and computational grid areused consistently.