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Knowing the impact to your white space if part of your chilled water system fails is essential to upkeeping data center performance. With this in mind, we have developed the 1D Liquid Side Network, so you can better assess the impact of your chilled water system on the white space. 

What is the 1D Liquid Side Network?

The 1D Liquid Side Network, new to Release 14, enables the engineer to create a network of piping and flow devices. This network presents a visual representation of how water flow is directed around your facility. Connections can be made between the logical 1D chilled water network and the 3D cooling units in the data center. This ensures that changes to the chilled water system, such as water flow or temperature, impact the performance of the data center cooling units and ultimately the performance of the white space itself.

In Release 14, you are now able to:

•Model the network of pipe systems for the chilled water system
•Model pipe lengths, pumps and simple chiller objects
•More accurately represent the chilled water infrastructure than past releases to perform failure analysis
•Add sensors for reference or control systems
•Model both snapshot and time-based transient simulations

How to Conduct Failure Analysis with the 1D Liquid Side Network

To add a Liquid Side Network to a model, right click Virtual Facility, hover New and select Liquid Side Network. You now have a blank canvas to drag and drop objects such as pumps, pipes, ACU connections and chillers into.

Figure 1. Virtual Facility>New>Liquid Side Network

For the purposes of this blog, we have a basic room with three ACUs. We are going to fail all three ACUs to learn how long the Chilled Water System can last before it overheats. 

Figure 2. Chilled water failure scenario: basic digital twin model

Figure 3. This model fails according to the above settings

You also have the option to view results as an animation. While viewing the Chilled Water Network, select Start under the Animations banner. Your transient simulation will begin, and the colors indicating the temperature of the water will appear a few seconds into the animation. 

Figure 4. View the Chilled Water System animation to conduct failure analysis

The results from the 1-D analysis demonstrate how long the chilled water system can maintain the required environment in the data center. With different failure scenarios possible, such as failing chillers and/or pumps, analysis can be run to investigate the resilience of the data center over time. This allows you to identify regions in the data center that pose more or less risk to IT thermal shutdown in a cooling failure scenario.

Starting Point for Modeling Multiple Spaces in One Network

Use the 1D Liquid Side Network to model piping and flow devices as well as test the impact of chilled water failure on data center whitespace. ACUs in the liquid side network can be used to connect the 1D network to your 3D model. In this way, the 1D Liquid Side Network is the starting point for modeling multiple spaces in one network. Look forward to even more objects related to this topic in Release 15!

Check out what else is new in Release 14 of 6SigmaDCX here.

This blog was originally published on November 18, 2019 and updated on March 30, 2020. *

Blog written by: Mark Fenton, Product Manager