Sharply increasing power dissipations in microprocessors and telecommunications systems have resulted in significant cooling challenges at the data center facility level.Energy efficient cooling of data centers has emerged as an area of increasing importance in electronics thermal management. One of the lowest cost options for significantly cutting the cooling cost for the data center is an airside economizer. If outside conditions are suitable, the airside economizer introduces the outside air into the data center, making it the primary source for cooling the space and hence a source of low cost cooling. Full-scale model of a representative data center was developed, with the arrangement of bringing outside air.Four different cities over the world were considered to evaluate the savings over the entire year.Results show a significant saving in chiller energy (upto 50%).The limits of relative humidity can be met at the inlet of the server for the proposed design, even if the outside air humidity is higher or lower than the allowable limits.The saving in the energy is significant and justifies the infrastructure improvements, such as improved filters and control mechanism for the outside air influx.

The thermal conductivities of nanofluids were measured as a function of temperature, particle size, and concentration. These nanofluids consisted of alumina, titania, or ceria dispersed in deionized water, ethylene glycol, or a mixture of the two. The results indicated that the temperature behavior of the thermal conductivity of the base fluid dominates that of the nanofluid. It was also discovered that decreasing nanoparticle size lowers the thermal conductivity of the nanofluid. None of the existing thermal conductivity models for heterogeneous materials was capable of predicting all of the observed relationships between thermal conductivity and temperature, particle size, volume fraction, and the thermal conductivities of the individual conductivities. Thus, a semi-empirical predictive model was proposed to predict the thermal conductivity of nanofluids. This model consists of the volume fraction-weighted geometric mean of the liquid and solid thermal conductivities where the solid conductivity is a function of particle size. The model provided predictions within 2.3 % of measured values in this work.

In this study, the film-cooling effectiveness in different regions of gas turbine blades was investigated with various film hole/slot configurations and mainstream flow conditions. The study consisted of three parts: 1) turbine blade span film-cooling, 2) turbine platform film-cooling, and 3) blade tip film-cooling. Pressure sensitive paint (PSP) technique was used to get the conduction-free film-cooling effectiveness distribution. Film-cooling effectiveness is assessed in terms of cooling hole geometry, blowing ratio, freestream turbulence, and coolant-to-mainstream density ratio. Blade span film-cooling test shows that the compound angle shaped holes offer better film effectiveness than the axial shaped holes. Greater coolant-to-mainstream density ratio prevents coolant to lift-off. Higher freestream turbulence causes effectiveness to drop everywhere except in the region downstream of suction side. Results are also correlated with momentum flux, compound shaped hole has the greatest optimum momentum flux ratio, and then followed by axial shaped hole, compound cylindrical hole, and axial cylindrical hole. For platform purge flow cooling, the stator-rotor gap was simulated by a typical labyrinth-like seal. Two different film-cooling hole geometries, three blowing ratios and density ratios, and two freestream turbulence are examined. Results showed that the shaped holes present higher film-cooling effectiveness and wider film coverage than the cylindrical holes, particularly at higher blowing ratios. Moreover, the platform film-cooling effectiveness increases with density ratio but decreases with turbulence intensity. The blade tip study was performed in a blow-down flow loop. Results show that a blowing ratio of 2.0 is found to give best results on the tip floor. Lift-off of the coolant jet can be observed for the holes closer to the leading edge as blowing ratio increases from 1.5 to 2.0. A stator vane suction side heat transfer study was conducted in a partial annular cascade. The heat transfer coefficients were measured by using the transient liquid crystal technique. At X/L=0.15, a low heat transfer region where transition occurs. The heat transfer coefficients increase toward the trailing edge as flow accelerates; a spanwise variation can be found at neat tip and hub portions due to passage and horseshoe vortices.

The heat flux demands for electronics cooling applications are quickly approaching the limits of conventional thermal management systems. To meet the demand of next generation electronics, a means for rejecting high heat fluxes at low temperatures in a compact system is an urgent need. To answer this challenge, in this work a gasketed chevron plate heat exchanger in conjunction with a slurry consisting of highly endothermic solid ammonium carbamate and a heat transfer fluid. A reduced-order 1-dimensional model was developed and used to solve the coupled equations for heat, mass, and momentum transfer. The feasibility of this chosen design for satisfying the heat rejection load of 2kW was also explored in this study. Also, a decomposition reaction using acetic acid and sodium bicarbonate was conducted in a plate heat exchanger (to simulate a configuration similar to the ammonium carbamate reactions). This enabled the experimental validation of the numerical predictions for the momentum transfer correlations used in this study (which in turn, are closely tied to both the heat transfer correlations and chemical kinetics models). These experiments also reveal important parameters of interest that are required for the reactor design. A numerical model was developed in this study and applied for estimating the reactor size required for achieving a power rating of 2 kW. It was found that this goal could be achieved with a plate heat exchanger weighing less than 70 kg (~100 lbs) and occupying a volume of 29 L (which is roughly the size of a typical desktop printer). Investigation of the hydrodynamic phenomena using flow visualization studies showed that the flow patterns were similar to those described in previous studies. This justified the adaptation of empirical correlations involving two-phase multipliers that were developed for air-water two-phase flows. High-speed video confirmed the absence of heterogeneous flow patterns and the prevalence of bubbly flow with bubble sizes typically less than 0.5 mm, which justifies the use of homogenous flow based correlations for vigorous gas-producing reactions inside a plate heat exchanger. Absolute pressure measurements - performed for experimental validation studies - indicate a significant rise in back pressure that are observed to be several times greater than the theoretically estimated values of frictional and gravitational pressure losses. The predictions from the numerical model were found to be consistent with the experimental measurements, with an average absolute error of ~26%

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-189).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 270-275).

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-81). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Vertical up-flow of supercritical fluid in the subchannel of a heated rod bundle was numerically simulated using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes ANSYS CFX and ANSYS FLUENT. A total of seven cases from three different sets of experiments were simulated. Three-dimensional steady-state predictions of fluid velocity, pressure, and temperature were made using five versions of two-equation RANS turbulence models with accompanying wall treatments. In addition, the temperature distribution in a solid region comprising a heater and sheathing was also computed in some cases. The k-epsilon turbulence model, implemented using CFX and scalable wall functions, provided the numerical results that have the smallest overall deviation from experimental results for three of the seven cases, and predicts the experimental data of the remaining four cases reasonably well, unlike other turbulence models that severely over-predict the experimental data for wall surface temperature. / February 2016

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