Funded PhD – Towards Greener Data Centres in Ireland: Enhancing Cooling and Energy Infrastructure to Decarbonise their Electricity Demand

PhD Position in the ERBE CDT, Ireland – 4 year studentship of €18,500 stipend per annum + fees

This research aims to create strategies to improve cooling and power infrastructure and optimise the performance of Datacentres as a whole by studying the breakdown of their energy needs, identifying which methodology will help minimise their energy requirement for cooling and find techniques to utilise waste heat.

With 66 operational DCs in Ireland, this project aims to take a step back and study the architecture of DCs as an energy system by carrying out an analysis to understand all the elements attributed to the supply, consumption, and waste of energy inside DCs, which is a hurdle for their expansion in the economy. This will help identify the means of reducing their carbon footprint which enables the government to remove the recently constructed barriers designed to limit their expansion to combat climate change and meet EU 2030 Energy targets.

The scientific design methodology also involves Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations linked with Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm method to investigate the potential for energy recovery for hybrid (combined air and liquid) cooling, at both server level and energy system level. Thermodynamics analysis will be carried out to compare the efficiency of typical servers in dissipating heat with the design focused on minimising the cooling demand while being cost-effective.

Further details here: https://www.marei.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ERBE-Project-Call_Sajad-Alimohammadi_revised.docx

Minimum of a 2.1 honours degree (level 8) in a relevant discipline