scope:

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been a trend toward increased volumes of power consumed at data centers, and this has become a problem from the perspective of reducing energy consumption. According to a survey report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in data centers that house large numbers of IT equipment, the volume of power consumed by the IT equipment is about the same as that consumed by devices on the facilities side, including A/Cs, lighting, and power equipment. In order to reduce the power consumption at data centers, it is therefore important to not only promote increased saving energy in IT equipment, but also to increase the operating efficiency of facility side equipment, and particularly A/Cs, which consume large amounts of power.

The authors focused on air cooled packaged air-conditioners, which are used in many data centers in Japan, and have been working on the development of constituent technologies that will contribute to saving energy in this equipment. We have succeeded in developing an A/C for data centers that incorporates these technologies. In this paper, we will introduce these saving energy technologies and the operating efficiency characteristics of the newly developed A/C, along with the results of field survey.