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Reduced-Order Modeling of Multiscale Turbulent Convection: Application to Data Center Thermal Management

Data centers are computing infrastructure facilities used by industries with large data processing needs and the rapid increase in power density of high performance computing equipment has caused many thermal issues in these facilities. Systems-level thermal management requires modeling and analysis of complex fluid flow and heat transfer processes across several decades of length scales. Conventional computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer techniques for such systems are severely limited as a design tool because their large model sizes render parameter sensitivity studies and optimization impractically slow.
The traditional proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) methodology has been reformulated to construct physics-based models of turbulent flows and forced convection. Orthogonal complement POD subspaces were developed to parametrize inhomogeneous boundary conditions and greatly extend the use of the existing POD methodology beyond prototypical flows with fixed parameters. A flux matching procedure was devised to overcome the limitations of Galerkin projection methods for the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations and greatly improve the computational efficiency of the approximate solutions. An implicit coupling procedure was developed to link the temperature and velocity fields and further extend the low-dimensional modeling methodology to conjugate forced convection heat transfer. The overall reduced-order modeling framework was able to reduce numerical models containing 105 degrees of freedom (DOF) down to less than 20 DOF, while still retaining greater that 90% accuracy over the domain.
Rigorous a posteriori error bounds were formulated by using the POD subspace to partition the error contributions and dual residual methods were used to show that the flux matching procedure is a computationally superior approach for low-dimensional modeling of steady turbulent convection.
To efficiently model large-scale systems, individual reduced-order models were coupled using flow network modeling as the component interconnection procedure. The development of handshaking procedures between low-dimensional component models lays the foundation to quickly analyze and optimize the modular systems encountered in electronics thermal management. This modularized approach can also serve as skeletal structure to allow the efficient integration of highly-specialized models across disciplines and significantly advance simulation-based design.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/14605
Date27 March 2006
CreatorsRambo, Jeffrey D.
PublisherGeorgia Institute of Technology
Source SetsGeorgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation

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