A revolutionary, energy-saving alternative to conventional air-con has just been installed at the University of Bolton.
Bolton is the first university in the UK to install the innovative system which uses a fraction of the power consumed by traditional air coolers, cutting carbon emissions and saving electricity.
The University is running the Energy Conservation in Computing Intensive Learning Environments (ECCILES) Project, one of three nationally prominent green IT projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The goal is to find innovative ways to reduce carbon and energy use in the university sector. The project draws on the University's expertise in innovation approaches, to generate a holistic set of solutions to reducing energy usage.
The direct evaporative air conditioner will cool C-block, home to the University's computer learning and lecturing rooms, computing laboratories and central computing facilities.
Here there is a high density of computer classrooms with high-spec workstations, 200 academic and support staff and a medium-size server room with 30 servers. The site accounts for 46% of the total electricity usage at the University.
The University will be closely monitoring the cooler over the next year to evaluate its environmental and energy-saving impact. Manufacturers say the system, called Breezier, uses 85-90% less energy than conventional air-con and so carbon emissions are cut by a similar proportion.
Each Breezair cooler contains large cooling pads which are kept wet during the operating cycle. Hot ambient air is drawn into a Breezair cooler by a quiet, powerful fan. The air passes through the water-soaked pads and the water absorbs some of the heat by natural evaporative process, resulting in a cool, refreshing breeze.
Directly feeling the benefit is C-block computing technician, Roger Kirkman. He said: 'Evaporative cooling systems have been used in data centres and factories but we are the first university in the country to install it.
'Our brief was to focus on innovative and groundbreaking solutions and we are confident this system achieves that. It has all the advantages of air-con, is just as quiet as air-con, but it used just one-tenth of the energy – a significant saving in carbon emissions and power.
'These unique systems use an indirect evaporative air conditioner with a patented revolutionary high-performance heat exchanger. The new data centre cooling system is an advanced and unique form of indirect evaporative cooling. It can achieve environmental conditions equivalent to or better than conventional air conditioning but, quite incredibly, with fraction of the electricity consumption.
'This is the second part of a project to manage air quality for C-Block. Built in the 1960s, C-Block has evolved to hosting high performance computing laboratories and university central computing facilities. Increased computer numbers and student occupancy has created a significant increase in power consumption, especially air management required to maintain teaching room's optimum for lectures and study.
'Part one included less sophisticated units for a teaching room and a school administration office. Both these units are performing well if not better than expected.'
Said Head of IT, Patrick O'Reilly: 'Bolton has many specialist computing laboratories with high-end workstations that are used for design and computation. Bolton's laboratories and design studios include those for network design, computer games design, sound and video production, CAD, animation and special effects. All contain workstations with powerful graphics cards, which are connected to fileservers and to large storage networks. All these technologies generate excess heat, driving a need for energy consuming air conditioning systems. They may also have unpredictable patterns of use, switching between intense periods of calculation – for example, for rendering animations, and long periods of idling. This makes simple power down strategies difficult to effect.'
So far, the result is a portfolio of energy saving measures for laboratories including:
* An innovative small scale free-air room cooling system
* Tools to help decision makers understand the impact of resource decisions
* An energy-auditing tool for classrooms
* Technology controls to power down computers and control lighting
* Use of server and desktop virtualisation to deal with peaks and troughs of use
* Awareness raising activities for students and staff.
Future plans are to secure funding for solar panels to power the system, further reducing carbon emissions.
Pictured: new cooling system