Novel Energy Recovery Systems for the Efficient Cooling of Data Centers using Absorption Chillers and Renewable Energy Resources

The study proposes an efficient energy recovery system for the cooling of a data center using renewable energy resources. The cooling system consists of an absorption chiller driven by the thermal energy recovered from the data center components and additional extra solar energy. The heat dissipated to the ambient by the data center racks is used to vaporize the cooling agents and thus activate the absorption Br-water refrigeration unit and cool the water which in turn will be used to cool the data center environment. When the thermal energy received from the data centers servers is not sufficient to activate the refrigeration unit, a dual system is proposed to heat the water needed for the absorption chiller, using solar energy or other available regenerative heat source. The current study will provide a solution for the optimal design of the data center/server cooling systems, the appropriate selection and the functional analysis of the absorption chiller together with the complementary heat exchangers required by the overall system. The efficiency of the system is defined in terms of the Coefficient of Performance (COP), the ratio between the recovered energy from the system and the total power dissipated by the system. The COP values can reach 0.33 for a typical system. The conclusions highlight the efficiency of the system and comparison to the classical solutions.