LU-VE S.p.A. has supplied evaporators for the cooling system of a 1,000 sq m (about 10,764 sq ft) data centre at the Táctica Business Park in Paterna, Spain, developed by KUMO Networks, a company controlled by El Corte Inglés. LU-VE said the project is the first in Spain and among the earliest in the world to use CO2 as a refrigerant in a large-scale data centre. Commissioning is scheduled in the coming weeks.
For the project, LU-VE said it developed evaporators that use CO2 in a transcritical cycle. The data centre was designed to Tier IV standards, which the source says means a fully fault-tolerant infrastructure, redundancy in every component and 99.995% uptime, equivalent to a maximum of 26.3 minutes of downtime per year.
LU-VE supplied 34 evaporators, 64 dual-airflow evaporators and 4 angular air coolers. The company said these industrial air coolers were designed for CO2 applications at medium and high temperatures and are used to extract hot air from the data centre equipment and direct cold airflow toward the IT racks.
The Paterna site has a cooling capacity of 1.5 MW (about 5.12 million BTU/h) and is powered by one of the largest geothermal fields in the Valencian Community, according to the source. The geothermal system is intended to help keep CO2 at its most efficient temperature during the hottest months.
Waste heat from the data centre’s cooling systems will be recovered for the local district heating network and used to supply nearby buildings. LU-VE said it began using CO2 in 2004 in a supermarket refrigeration plant in Wettingen, Switzerland.
