Data centres play an important role as the infrastructure backbone of Singapore’s digital economy. Due to ever-increasing computing demand such as emerging technologies in 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT), data centres consumed vast amounts of energy when in operations. There are currently about 60 data centres in Singapore, consuming over 350MW which adds up to more than 7% of the nation’s electricity¹. 

The Singapore government takes a strong position with regard to protecting our climate that could otherwise negatively impact our environment because of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2019, the Singapore government informed the industry of a temporary pause on the development of new data centres ² to ensure their growth in a sustainable manner and reduce carbon footprint. To further address global climate change, Singapore also aims to halve its 2030 peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

Recognising these opportunities and the need for more cooling solutions, A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) partnered with a local SME, ERS Industries Pte Ltd (ERS) and its spin-off, KoolLogix Pte Ltd ³ to co-innovate a novel heat removal solution - KoolLogix. KoolLogix is a gravity-driven, refrigerant-based and passive heat removal green data centre cooling solution. 

Features

The Science Behind

IHPC has developed an advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to simulate air flow and heat transfer in a data centre. The model is then applied to assess the performances of different test parameters of cool air management systems in data centres, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The simulation results compare reasonably well with experimental data measured by KoolLogix. This indicates the capabilities of the digital model in predicting heat removal module (HRM) performance.

Fig 1: Computational domain 

The validated digital model can be applied for multiple HRM units and E@Racks ⁴ in a large-scale data centre simulation, as shown in Fig. 2. KoolLogix has implemented trials at commercial data centre sites, with the verification from both experiments and simulation, including one local site and two international sites. The technology has shown to be highly energy-efficient and achieves the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.29, compared to the pre-installation of KoolLogix which is more than 3.0 ⁵.

Fig 2: Simulation results for a cooling redundancy scenario study

#1 Singapore authorities invite applications for new data centers
#2 MTI: Written reply to PQ on new data centres
#3 About KoolLogix
#4 About E@Racks
#5 A*STAR and local SME develop energy-efficient cooling system for data centres that reduces energy consumption by up to 50 per cent