An Approach to Robust Design of Turbulent Convective Systems

The complex turbulent flow regimes encountered in many thermal-fluid engineering applications have proven resistant to the effective application of systematic design because of the computational expense of model evaluation and the inherent variability of turbulent systems. In this paper the integration of a novel reduced order turbulent convection modeling approach based upon the proper orthogonal decomposition technique with the application of robust design principles implemented using the compromise decision support problem is investigated as an effective design approach for this domain. In the example application considered, thermally efficient computer server cabinet configurations that are insensitive to variations in operating conditions are determined. The computer servers are cooled by turbulent convection and have unsteady heat generation and cooling air flows, yielding substantial variability, yet have some of the most stringent operational requirements of any engineering system. Results of the application of this approach to an enclosed cabinet example show that the resulting robust thermally efficient configurations are capable of dissipating up to a 50% greater heat load and a 60% decrease in the temperature variability using the same cooling infrastructure.