Mechanical Analysis Blog

Hello Everyone This is a bit of a follow up to my previous blog about the FloVENT analysis of the Mentor Graphics Data Centers in Wilsonville, OR and Shannon, Ireland.  http://www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/blog/post/mentor-graphics-data-center-design-using-cfd-modeling-fc6dbfc3-ec40-431a-8628-67375c2e946a Well the one in Shannon, Ireland has been online for a while now, and our Wilsonville, … Read More

CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, ASME, Plano, Texas, Dallas, Data Center

Hello Everybody   Previously, I co-authored a semitherm paper on the use of our HVAC CFD tool, FloVENT, on the design of a Mentor Graphics data center.  Recently I have seen this topic republished in the data center journal with the title “EDA Vendor takes its Own Advice on Data Center Design”.  I find this topic interesting, so I thought I’d blog about this and break from my typical … Read More

Raised Floor, Rack, Semitherm, CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Cabinet, HVAC, Mentor Graphics, Data Center, FloVENT

What do you call someone who doesn’t believe in Father Christmas? A rebel without a Claus. Right, that’s that out of the way. This week Facebook announced that it plans to build a 300,000 ft^2 data center in Lulea, Sweden. The Lulea business agency who helped attract Facebook to their city are dutifully excited as should Facebook be as they look set to capitalise on 10 months each year of … Read More

data center cooling, data centre, Data Center, HVAC, PUE, Electronics Cooling, FloVENT

The internet is big. It’s not sentient yet, though Robert Swayer has written a compelling story of how it might ‘Wake‘. In fact it’s far from intelligent at all. Banal comments about “how we ever managed without it” will age so quickly that future historians will assume a typo, more intelligence than we currently have and take the phrase to have been “how did we ever manage with it”. It looks like … Read More

data center cooling, data centre, Data Center, FloVENT, HVAC, data centre cooling, Electronics Cooling

CFD is a powerful design tool when considering a data center cooling scheme. With CFD you can display contour plots of temperature, speed, and for the purists there is pressure.  I, perhaps naively, have always considered pressure to be a means to an end.  I can absolutely see the value of pressure in terms of “pressure drop” but for me to look at a contour plot of pressure at a room level and deduce … Read More

CFD, Data Center, Capture Index

I just about fell out of my chair when I heard about a new trend in using alternative or green sources of energy for data center cooling. Apparently, the good folks at HP recently released a research paper on the use of cattle waste as a source of power for cooling data centers.  No, seriously. The NY Times ran a story about the research paper and said that  “according to HP’s calculations, 10,000 cows … Read More

Data Center, data center cooling, CFD

I’ve been remiss in not posting for a couple of weeks, so I’m trying to get back in the saddle. I’ve been working on other things that have taken up a fair bit of time. One is a web seminar on heatsinks – Heatsink 201 – Even More about Heat Sinks which follows on from Alexandra Francois-Saint-Cyr’s very successful Heat Sink 101 web seminar. Back in March I posted about IBM’s work on liquid cooling … Read More

FloVENT, Google, ASHRAE, Building HVAC, Air Cooling, Green building design, Data Center, Liquid Cooling, Electronics Cooling, CFD, Thermal Management, Cost Saving

We are all familiar with the industrial revolution – a period where major changes in the way we did stuff (whether it was food production, manufacturing, moving from point A to point B … pretty much everything we did) impacted not only the economy but also our culture as well. So imagine my surprise when I heard on the radio that we are smack-dab in the middle of the next industrial revolution. Gain … Read More

Passenger Comfort, Parking Structures, Ventilation, CFD, Data Center, Built Environment, Green, Office Building, Environmental Impact

I think that we can all agree that one feature of CFD over test is the ability to visualize where the flow is going.  It is quite easy in CFD analysis tools, at least in our tools, to seed the flow any where within the solution and follow particles upstream and/or downstream.  The limitation of this is that it is the results are qualitative.  CFD has the capability, without an extreme amount of extra … Read More

Flow Visualization, CFD, Concentration, Capture Index, FloEFD, FloVENT, Data Center, Electronics Cooling

When a person describes their ideal design software, or any software for that matter, Ease-of-Use is always on the list of desirable attributes. It makes sense that in order to be productive with the software in the shortest amount of time the software must be easy to use.  All of the  CAD and CFD tools I work with strive to achieve this goal (except for one which I won’t name and it isn’t one of our … Read More

Data Center, Ease of Use, CFD, Thermal Design, Electronics Cooling

When talking about increasing energy efficiency in a data center, a lot of people stop listening because the issue of sacrificing uptime always rears up its head . Uptime should not even be a topic of discussion. It should be a given. Even in this day and age, many facilities just leave the thermostat at a low level because it’s a safe bet. But it’s not necessarily the right thing to do for the environment. … Read More

Energy, Physical Prototype, CFD, Airflow, Data Center, Efficient, Environmental Impact