A novel data center air conditioner and its application scheme balancing high-efficiency cooling and waste heat recovery: Environmental and economic analysis

Data centers require continuous cooling throughout the year and produce a large amount of low-grade waste heat. How to fully utilize the waste heat while ensuring the efficiency of air conditioning is a problem that needs to be addressed. In this paper, a data center air conditioning with heat recovery function was constructed, and the application scheme of the novel system that considers both high-efficiency cooling and waste heat recovery was proposed. The feasibility analysis was conducted at a data center in Shenyang, with the heat pipe/vapor compression high-efficiency system for cooling and the coal-fired boiler for heating as the comparison scheme. The results show that although adding heat recovery function realizes the utilization of waste heat in data centers, it also increases the energy consumption of the system. The centralized application scheme composed of a single large system reduces annual carbon emissions by 0.9 % and increases operating costs by 12.6 %. The distributed application scheme composed of multiple small systems reduces annual carbon emissions by 14.6 % and reduces operating costs by 3.5 %.