An interview with CAREL’s Vice President Luigi Nalini. This is Part 3 if a three-part series.
The air conditioning market also literally exploded, with more competitors, all striving for the highest performance. Supplied by CAREL
On 31 May CAREL participated at DCN in Milan, an event offering the opportunity to meet the main operators in the sector and discuss technologies, innovation, and energy saving.
LN Greater awareness of savings came about with the boom in massive Internet data centres driven by the cloud and AI, where the cost of energy is an extremely important expense item.
EB Yes, that makes perfect sense: after all, a manufacturer with its own data centre sees energy consumption as a small percentage of its costs compared, for example, to the production equipment (take for example a steel mill). While for a large Internet operator whose core business is running computers, data centre energy consumption is one of its main expense items.
At the same time, the air conditioning market also literally exploded, with more competitors, all striving for the highest performance, often driven by larger customers and therefore able to work with in-house or outside consultants for innovative designs and with performance validated by real-life tests.
Over time, from variable-speed fans to electronic expansion valves for the refrigerant circuit, many innovations have been adopted in data centre air conditioning; recently, the technology that seems to be growing most in the future is liquid cooling, which however is not entirely new. What do you think?
LN First of all, it should be remembered that technology becomes interesting when its cost is sustainable compared to the benefits it brings: variable-speed fans were used to control air flow in refrigeration units based on the outside temperature: as the power consumed varies in relation to the flow-rate cubed, these offered immediate benefits also in terms of energy consumption.
When this technology became more affordable, it was able to be adopted as standard: the possibility of assessing the initial investment with a view to payback time is therefore decisive. The same happened for electronic valves.
As far as liquid cooling goes, this is far from a novel idea; there are various solutions: in direct contact with the chip via a heat exchanger is something that I have personally worked on as part of an important project.
Between the 80’s and 90’s, IBM introduced a series of powerful mainframes (System 3080 and the ES9000 family) with three times the heat emitted by the chips compared to previous generations, reaching almost 10 W/cm2; this made air cooling impracticable and therefore closed-loop water cooling circuit was required, with the fluid kept at a virtually constant temperature of 17-24°C, naturally higher than the ambient dew point to avoid condensation.
At the time I was working on the design of the “DATA-CHILLER”, an indoor closed-loop water chiller with pumps and three independent refrigerant circuits – with hot gas bypass – one of which in active standby for rotation. A project I found extremely satisfying.
EB Challenging and inspiring. I’d go as far to say that it was the essence of an application-centred approach that we have carried forward as an important asset over the years: continuing to understand the entire ecosystem so as to optimise a small part of it, which then brings a global benefit; just like small steps in the journey to sustainability.
Thank you, this has been enlightening and informative… so what can I say… see you again for another?
Source: CAREL’s website
