This American rating system, launched in 2013 and now in the UK, challenges the built environment from a wellness perspective, while the UK’s earlier environmental assessment method, BREEAM, also places some attention on things like thermal comfort and air volumes.
Various structural options can be considered to minimise material usage and reduce building height, carbon, and cost, whilst not compromising cooling performance.. CFD can provide evidence during the design process to minimise design risk and help optimise data hall designs further.This allows the design to be improved across all disciplines.
Below is an example of a structural study, looking at how structural options affect the air pressures within the data hall.. Pressure Plots from a recent Structural Optimisation CFD Analysis Study.External CFD Model.External CFD analysis plays a crucial role in data centre design by assessing the risk of hot air being entrained by cooling equipment.
We can identify potential design risks and understand prevalence and impact.At Bryden Wood, our team utilises CFD analysis from pre-planning to detailed design stages, leveraging its insights to navigate the dynamic nature of site massing and reconcile technical requirements with local regulations.
This helps optimise the process and allows architects to test options that may reduce the building footprint and massing..
External CFD is also a great tool for site-agnostic design.Hydrogen is required to produce ammonia, for example, an important material in many plastic production processes.
The benefit of water electrolysis is that it uses 7.5% less electricity than other methods.‘Black hydrogen’ is hydrogen produced using natural gas (methane) that is reacted with steam in a steam reformer, and ‘blue hydrogen’ uses carbon capture during the same process to reuse some of the carbon.
Even with carbon capture, blue hydrogen still uses fossil fuels, so in some instances carbon capture needs to be used effectively.It isn’t a blanket fix for every process..