CFD BASED DESIGN AND MODELLING OF WIND FENCE TO MITIGATE HIGH-SPEED WIND LOADING ON A MODULAR DATA CENTER

Abstract

A Modular Data Center (MDC) is a portable method of deploying a data center’s capacity. As an alternative to the traditional data center, an MDC can be placed anywhere data capacity is required. But this comes at the cost of making the MDC operable at any desired location with the environmental factors such as earthquakes and heavy winds. This study focuses on mitigating high-speed wind loading on the MDCs by designing a wind fence to reduce wind speed.

Although wind fences are used in many agricultural and farming practices, their usage pertaining to MDCs is very limited. The challenge is to reduce wind speed from 100 mph to 10 mph. This has been achieved by iteratively designing and analyzing a wind fence using CFD simulations to come up with a few wind fence options that have defined properties such as height, perforation and location (distance from the inlet of MDC) of the wind fence.