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Microturbines Power, Cool Servers Simultaneously
jfruhlinger writes "The infrastructure of a large data center poses two main problems: You need to find a way to reliably power all those servers, and you need to figure out a way to deal with the heat those servers put off. Syracuse University and the University of Toledo are experimenting with one gadget to solve both problems. Small power units that run on natural gas, called microturbines, provide reliable DC power separate from the utility grid, and their heat output can paradoxically be harnessed to cool the servers and transmit the heat to other buildings on campus."
Purdue has done this for years, but with macro turbines. The main physical plant provides power, chilled water and heat most of the University.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Can they sell unused power back to the grid?
My gaming PC already sounds like a Hoover and now you're telling me the next evolution in cooling is to put a turbine in it? :o(
Will it finally have meaning?
Will future PCs suffer from turbine lag?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is combined heat and power many facilities do it. It is green in the sense that energy is conserved because waste heat is used rather than discarded. A data center seems to be a good opportunity. The turbine converts 1 CH4 unit to 0.3 electricity, while the absorption chiller will move about as much energy as it consumes (COP 1), which means the 0.7 waste heat off the turbine can easily move the 0.3 units of data center electricity out of the data center and 0.4 units of waste heat (+ 0.3 data center heat) can still be used for another purpose. It might be good for a data center operator, but from a systems perspective the better use for that CH4 is still in a combined cycle utility plant which can make 0.6 electricity, use the waste heat for some co-located industrial facility and make the datacenter run an electric AC (COP ~ 3).
Traditional gas turbine generators run 5-10MW for small ones, up to 100MW for large ones. In this case, a microturbine would be something small on 10-100kW. Note that a large automotive turbocharger is capable of 100kW or more. On the plus side, multiple smaller units means a more redundant system with less overhead. On the minus side, several small turbines is both more expensive and less efficient than one large one of the same output. It would be cheaper to just go with two large turbines, each capable of handling the full power load of the server farm.
Someone's never heard of LP gas-powered refrigerators.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/89710-the-fanless-spinning-heatsink-the-heatsink-is-the-fan
Hehe, I run an S&P 500 company on 40kW and 12 tons of AC, virtualization and SSD's for high IOPS loads are a wonderful thing. In fact I'll probably be well below 30kW in 6 months if I can get the 4 shelves of 450GB drives to fill out my new SAN (damn floods in Asia) so I can retire the old one and all the old P4 based servers connected to it that constitute almost half my physical server count at this point.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Turbines can do a lot of work. They can produce power and compressed air simultaneously. Would be interesting if that compressed air supply was run through one of these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube We have a small one in the shop, a very simple device. Connecting it to our shop air, at 125psi, creates air at one end that will make your fingers go numb, and the other end outputs heat at about hair drier temperatures. The tube is about 6 inches long and 1 inch in diameter.