Study of cooling performances and energy saving potential for separator enhanced thermosiphon/vapor compression hybrid system

With the advancement of technology, the energy consumption of data centers has dramatically increased. Among them, the energy consumption of cooling equipment accounts for more than 40% of the total energy consumption of data centers. To reduce energy consumption and enhance performance, A novel separator enhanced thermosiphon/Vapor compression hybrid cooling system (STPVC) has been proposed. The cooling performances of the STPVC system are assessed through experimental test and comparisons in the conventional hybrid system (CTPVC) are shown in this paper as well. The experimental results indicate that compared to the CTPVC, the STPVC system can achieves a maximum improvement of 30.91% in thermosiphon mode and 19.3% improvement in vapor compression mode Additionally, to evaluate the energy saving potential of the STPVC, the annual energy efficiency ratios (AEER) of the system in various latitude cities of China have been theoretically calculated. A high AEER of the system about 15.3 can be achieved in the high latitude area. Even in the low-latitude region, the system also can gain the value of AEER about 5.45. The results of this paper are expected to provide a direction of performances enhancement and energy consumption reduction of the cooling equipment in the data center.