APC by Schneider Electric has announced the EcoBreeze, a modular indirect evaporative and air-to-air heat exchanger cooling solution.
The system has the ability to switch automatically between air-to-air and indirect evaporative heat exchange to consistently and efficiently provide cooling to data centres.
The design of the EcoBreeze is able to reduce energy consumption by leveraging temperature differences between outside ambient air compared to IT return air to provide economised cooling to the data centre. The EcoBreeze meets ASHRAE 90.1/TC 9.9 requirements for efficiency and economisation with multiple frame sizes with varying voltages and phases to address any data centre’s cooling needs.
As data centres are constantly expanding and local energy companies place heavy restrictions on a data centre’s ability to pull more power from the grid, there is an urgent need to reduce power consumption through energy efficiency and economisation. The EcoBreeze addresses the needs of today’s data centres by implementing multiple forms of economisation into each module. The unit, located outside the perimeter of the data centre, takes advantage of localised climates and can automatically switch between two forms of economised cooling:
* Air-to-air heat exchange brings hot IT air in from the data centre through the module’s EC (electronically commutated) fans, which is then passed through internal channels of the indirect evaporative cooler (IEC). After the IT air is cooled it leaves the IEC and passes through a cooling coil and is returned to the data centre.
* When ambient temperatures cannot support an air-to-air heat exchange, cooling is done through indirect evaporative cooling, which removes heat from the IT air by evaporating water on the outside of the heat exchanger channels. This solution prevents the outside air from coming in contact with the data centre air, regardless of which cooling mode is used.
The EcoBreeze has a proportional R410a refrigerant system as well as an onboard water treatment system, eliminating the need for chemical water treatment. This feature addresses environmental concerns associated with some refrigerant- or water-based systems.
The system is available in individual 50 kW modules that can be grouped up to four modules (200 kW) or eight modules (400 kW) of sensible cooling. This modular, scalable approach enables customers to purchase only what they need to meet their current cooling requirements while giving them the ability to increase their cooling capacity at any time as their data centre grows. This modularity also provides redundancy at the frame level and ensures availability of the system even through maintenance and service intervals. Power, water, air flow distribution and communication connections are centralised to the frame to simplify installation requirements. Additionally, as the unit is located outside the perimeter of the data centre, the EcoBreeze takes up zero whitespace, enabling IT managers to utilise space in the data centre to increase its capacity without having to allot for space to include additional cooling units.
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