Nortek liquid cooling liked by Facebook

USA: Nortek Air Solutions’ StatePoint liquid cooling system has been employed in two buildings at Facebook’s new €300m data centre in Clonee, Ireland. 

The new data centre, opened towards the end of last year on a 250 acre site, is the latest of six Facebook data centres worldwide handling the data of 2.5 billion Facebook users.

The StatePoint system, uses indirect air-liquid-air cooling with a liquid-to-air heat exchanger that cools water by having the water evaporate through a membrane separation layer that prevents cross-contamination between the water and air streams.

It captures the cooling developed directly in the water circuit as well as in the air flow, operating in multiple modes to minimise water and power consumption.

With the addition of a pre-cooling coil, the system can maintain required cooling water temperatures in humid climates without supplemental condenser-based cooling.

“This new exchanger technology addresses some of the fundamental disadvantages of open spray and wetted media evaporative cooling systems and opens up new possibilities for high performance liquid cooling in data centers and other applications,” explained Philip LePoudre, fellow engineer of Nortek.