IT Cooling Using Natural Refrigerants
The Alpine city of Innsbruck, Austria, has long benefited from the crystal-clear spring water that seeps deep within the nearby mountains. It can be sampled at the city’s many public drinking fountains and is also supplied to many households. The system relies on a sophisticated network of tunnels and tanks.
Recently, local facilities company IKB decided to add a disused underground tank to the network by installing a data center in the empty space. “The old tank was built with three-foot-thick concrete walls, and the plan was to use that for the servers and then construct a new building for the cooling equipment and the control systems,” says Alexander Streit, Managing Partner of construction company Streit-TGA. The company, based in Holzkirchen, 18.5 miles south of Munich, Germany, was contracted to supply the entire cooling plant. It specializes in modular construction, so the plant was prefabricated at its headquarters and then transported in parts via a two-hour drive to Innsbruck.
When it comes to cooling, Streit-TGA is a pioneer within the design and construction industry, having made the decision in 2020 to use only natural refrigerants in its refrigeration systems.
Streit believes the strategy has given his company an important first-mover advantage in the market. “I think suppliers who don’t follow us will have problems in the next few years because customers are increasingly asking for natural solutions,” he says. “And there are two reasons for that. The first is that they are increasingly focused on their environmental responsibility. And the second is that the follow-up costs with natural refrigerants are much lower than with synthetics.”
One of Streit-TGA’s areas of expertise is the construction of data centers, in particular, with a focus on low-energy solutions. “For that reason, it’s very important for us to use components that are as efficient as possible,” says Streit.
Data centers generate an enormous amount of heat, and it’s essential to keep facilities at an ideal temperature 24/7 to prevent critical IT equipment from overheating, causing costly downtime. That means a high-quality cooling system is vital, but it also needs to be efficient: saving energy isn’t just an environmental concern for data center managers – it has a significant impact on profitability.
In order to evaluate which cooling system would be most effective in the Innsbruck data center and how it could operate with maximum efficiency, Streit-TGA took advantage of myGPC, the Güntner Product Configurator that’s available for use as part of the myGüntner online customer portal. This can identify the optimum cooling system for any scenario. The software provides a quick and reliable thermodynamic calculation and proposal based on various parameters, such as the desired refrigerant, ambient humidity, and evaporator and condenser temperatures. Noise was also a factor in this case because there were homes in the vicinity.
The best solution was found to be two Güntner V-shape VARIO Dry Coolers, using propane as the refrigerant. The environmentally friendly system, operated via a aicore™ air smart controller, offers high energy efficiency and low noise, together with the use of minimum space. In addition, myGPC was used to determine the different operating points and partial load functions of the system, ensuring maximum efficiency and resource saving. “The reason we used a Güntner cooling system in this case was because it offered the lowest possible energy consumption,” says Streit. “And it also offered the choice of natural refrigerants.”