Data Center Thermal Engineering: From Chip to Chiller
الهندسة الحرارية لمراكز البيانات: من الشريحة إلى المبرد
- Next date
- 25–29 January 2027Abu Dhabi
- Fees from
- £2,950per delegate
- Formats
- Classroom · Online4 sessions
- Duration
- 5 daysCertificate
Overview
Every watt delivered to a server ends up as heat that must be moved out of the building. In a modern data center, that heat passes through a long chain of components: the chip package, heat sinks or cold plates, server fans, the white space air or liquid loop, cooling units, chilled water, and finally the heat rejection plant. Each link adds thermal resistance, consumes energy and introduces risk. Engineers who understand the whole chain can size equipment correctly, avoid hidden bottlenecks and make better trade-offs between capital cost, efficiency and resilience.
This course follows the heat path from the chip to the chiller and treats it as one engineered system. Participants learn the thermodynamics and heat transfer that govern data center cooling, the thermal limits of processors and memory, and the behavior of airflow in racks, aisles and rooms. The course covers air and liquid cooling architectures, cooling unit selection, chilled water temperatures, economization, psychrometrics, environmental envelopes and the energy balance of the whole facility. Participants practice building thermal models, calculating temperature budgets and comparing design options using realistic loads from enterprise, cloud and AI deployments.
Objectives
- Trace the complete heat path from processor die to final heat rejection
- Apply heat transfer and thermodynamics to size data center cooling equipment
- Calculate airflow, temperature rise and thermal budgets at rack and room level
- Compare air, liquid and hybrid cooling architectures for different load densities
- Use psychrometrics and environmental envelopes to set safe operating conditions
- Evaluate economization options and their effect on annual cooling energy
- Build a facility thermal model and use it to test design alternatives
- Identify thermal bottlenecks and propose practical engineering improvements
Who should attend
Mechanical, HVAC and design engineers, consultants and data center engineering staff responsible for cooling systems.
Training methodology
The course is engineering-led and calculation-based. Short technical sessions are followed by worked examples that use realistic server, rack and facility data. Participants build a simple spreadsheet thermal model during the week and extend it each day, from chip-level resistances to the annual energy of the cooling plant. Psychrometric chart exercises, airflow calculations and design comparisons are completed in small teams. Case studies of overheating events and inefficient designs show how small errors propagate through the heat path. Each day ends with a design review and a short quiz.
Programme outline
Day1Heat Transfer Foundations for Data Centers
- Why thermal engineering drives the size, cost and efficiency of data centers
- Conduction, convection and radiation applied to servers, racks and white space
- Sensible heat equations linking power, airflow, water flow and temperature difference
- Thermal resistance networks and how to model each link in the heat path
- Specific heat, density and flow properties of air, water and common coolants
- Units, conversions and rules of thumb used by data center cooling engineers
- Exercise: converting IT load into required airflow and chilled water flow rates
Day2From Chip to Rack
- Processor, GPU and memory thermal limits and how vendors define them
- Heat sinks, vapor chambers and cold plates and their thermal performance
- Server fan behavior, fan laws and the hidden energy cost of high inlet temperatures
- Rack airflow paths, blanking panels, cable management and recirculation risks
- Rack density trends from enterprise loads to AI training clusters
- Hybrid racks where liquid captures most heat and air removes the remainder
- Exercise: building a chip-to-rack temperature budget for a high-density server
- Team review of temperature margins and the weakest link in the budget
Day3From Rack to Room
- Hot aisle and cold aisle layouts and the principles of containment
- Perimeter, in-row and rear-door cooling units and where each performs best
- Raised floor versus slab designs and their effect on air distribution
- Bypass air, recirculation and how to measure them in an operating hall
- Introduction to computational fluid dynamics and how to judge model quality
- Cooling unit selection based on sensible capacity, airflow and return temperature
- Exercise: sizing cooling units and containment for a 1 MW data hall
Day4From Room to Plant
- Chilled water supply temperatures and their influence on chiller efficiency
- Psychrometrics, humidity control and the risk of condensation on cold surfaces
- Environmental envelopes for IT equipment and the trade-off between risk and energy
- Air-side and water-side economization and annual hours of free cooling
- Heat rejection with cooling towers, dry coolers and adiabatic systems
- Building the facility energy balance and estimating annual cooling energy
- Exercise: plotting operating points on a psychrometric chart for several climates
Day5System Design and Optimization
- Comparing air, liquid and hybrid architectures for a given load and site
- Thermal bottlenecks that limit capacity growth in existing data centers
- Redundancy and its effect on temperatures during equipment failure scenarios
- Raising supply temperatures safely to unlock economizer and chiller savings
- Thermal monitoring, sensor placement and using data to validate design assumptions
- Team project: developing and presenting a chip-to-chiller design for a new facility
- Final assessment and discussion of thermal challenges in participants' facilities
Dates and fees
Fees are in GBP. per delegate.
Certificate
Every delegate who attends the full programme receives a Harfard Technology certificate of completion stating the course title, duration, dates and venue.
Frequently asked questions
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