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Datacenter Cooling Unit Selection | Engineering Database

Datacenter Cooling Unit Selection

mechanical

Selects cooling units for datacenter IT loads. Looks up ASHRAE thermal guidelines for the specified class, calculates required airflow, selects units from the cooling-specs table by cooling type and sensible capacity, applies redundancy, and computes partial PUE contribution from cooling.

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It Load Kw*

Total IT equipment power draw in kW that must be rejected as heat. Typical: 5-20 kW/rack for enterprise, 30-70 kW/rack for AI/HPC, 100+ kW/rack for liquid-cooled GPU racks.

Cooling Type

Cooling unit type. CRAH: chilled water air handler (large rooms). CRAC: DX compressor unit. in_row: close-coupled to racks. rear_door: passive/active heat exchanger on rack rear. CDU: coolant distribution unit for liquid cooling. If omitted, defaults to 'in_row'.

Redundancy

Cooling redundancy scheme. N: no spare units, full capacity only. N+1: one additional unit for fault tolerance (industry standard for Tier II+). If omitted, defaults to 'N+1'.

Ashrae Class

ASHRAE TC 9.9 thermal class for the IT environment. A1: tightest envelope (18-27 C recommended inlet). A2-A4: progressively wider allowable ranges for hardened equipment. If omitted, defaults to 'A1'.

Supply Air Temp C

Cold aisle supply air temperature in degrees Celsius. If omitted, defaults to the ASHRAE recommended minimum for the selected class. Typical: 18-24 C.

Return Air Temp C

Hot aisle return air temperature in degrees Celsius. If omitted, defaults to supply temp + ~11 C (20 F delta-T). Must be greater than supply_air_temp_C.

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Reference data

This calculator pulls live values from the following engineering reference tables in the database.

datacenter cooling specs
datacenter thermal guidelines

About this calculator

Datacenter Cooling Unit Selection is part of the Engineering Database calculator suite. Each tool runs deterministic calculations against authoritative reference data and code-compliant methods, so results are reproducible and traceable to source standards.

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