The increase in computing performance of electronic equipment is causing higher power consumption and in turn higher heat dissipation. On the larger scale, data centers that house hundreds of these individual electronic equipment are foreseeing an inevitable increase in heat dissipation on a facility level. The cooling cost of these rooms is becoming a major challenge, where a specified inlet temperature must not be exceeded in order to insure the safe and reliable operation of the electronic equipment. Most of the data centers in use today adopt the hot aisle-cold aisle configuration, where air is supplied through a plenum. The major problem with this configuration is the mixing of cold supply air from the tiles with hot exhaust air from the servers. This affects the efficiency of the cooling infrastructure and in turn affects the cost of operation. This study concentrates on the idea of sealing the cold aisle. Completely sealing the cold aisle is not practical due to pressure and noise problems, and therefore a perforated ceiling is proposed. A parametric study is generated to look at the effects of perforated ceiling resistance and different CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) airflow supply percentage on the inlet temperature of the racks. A metric is proposed to quantify the variation of inlet temperature across the height of a rack and for a given cold aisle.
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