A survey on data center cooling systems: Technology, power consumption modeling and control strategy optimization

Data center is a fundamental infrastructure of computers and networking equipment to collect, store, process, and distribute huge amounts of data for a variety of applications such as Cyber–Physical–Social Systems, business enterprises and social networking. As the demands of remote data services keep increasing, both the workload of the data center and its power consumption are rapidly rising. An indispensable part of a data center is the cooling system which provides a suitable operation environment, and accounts for around 30% of the power consumption of the data center. Therefore, optimized energy management of data center’s cooling system is a highly profitable research area. Generally, a cooling system is made up of a mechanical refrigeration sub-system and a terminal cooling sub-system. Heat generated during operation of the data center will be absorbed by the latter one, and transferred into the outdoor environment via the former one. Depending on the cooling principle, current cooling solutions can be classified into air-cooling, liquid-cooling or free cooling technology. Although air-cooling is widely used in most existing data centers, the other two solutions have attracted more interests due to their excellent cooling effectiveness and higher energy efficiencies. Among the different cooling equipment, the chillers and fans are the major power consumers of the entire cooling system. Therefore, modeling of their power consumption is important for energy management of the cooling system, which can be classified into mechanism-based methods and data-driven methods. Based on the aforementioned models, optimization strategies for the operation management of cooling equipment are proposed to reduce the power consumption of the cooling system, which mainly includes the model predictive control-based methods and reinforcement learning-based methods. This paper is an overview of the data center’s cooling system, which mainly includes the mainstream cooling solutions, the power consumption modeling methods and the optimization control strategies. In addition, several current challenges and future work in the data center’s cooling system are described.