Data centre cooling
Data centre and data hall cooling simulation
Air distribution through a hall, the recirculation that causes hot spots, and rack-level thermal behaviour where the air and the hardware are solved together. Runs as conjugate heat transfer when the solid matters, and as a frozen-flow thermal pass when the flow field has settled and only the temperature is in question.
Questions this answers
- Where are the hot spots, and which racks cause them?
- How much supply air is recirculating rather than doing work?
- What happens to inlet temperatures if a unit fails?
- Does a containment change actually improve anything?
- How long does the hall have before temperatures become a problem?
The analysis types that do it
Each of these is a case type in the application, not a configuration you assemble. Every one runs in the free build — the free tier limits mesh size and cores, never which physics you may use.
And in the other modules
Structural, thermal and electromagnetics ship alongside fluids. Only the types that run today are listed.
Backends underneath
chtMultiRegionFoamchtMultiRegionSimpleFoambuoyantSimpleFoambuoyantPimpleFoambuoyantBoussinesqSimpleFoamlaplacianFoamthermoFoamsimpleFoam
Open-source solvers, selected and configured from the case type. You can still read every dictionary the application writes.
When it will not fit on your machine
Paid accounts can send meshing and solving to SHD Cloud and keep working locally. The estimate is shown before the run starts.
What this does not do
- No rack or CRAC component library — equipment is geometry and a heat load, built once per site.
- PUE and other facility metrics are not computed.
- No live telemetry coupling. This is a design tool, not a digital twin of a running hall.
Naming a sector here says the physics suits the work. It is not a claim that anyone in it is a customer.