Berkeley Scientific Journal

An emerging technology to alleviate rising energy demands for data centers are economizers, which turn off the power consuming chillers and bring in outside air for cooling. However, contaminants in outdoor air can lower the reliability of the electronics through corrosion, which can negate any energy savings. This experiment seeks to determine if the indoor air quality of economizer systems is suitable for data center use. The mass concentrations of the particulate matter were measured both inside and outside of the data center, using aerosol instruments. Particles were captured using collection filters, to identify their chemical properties. It is shown that indoor particle concentrations rise when the economizer is operating, due to bringing in outside air. However, the concentrations are well below the ASHRAE standard, which confirms that economizer use does not pose a risk for the servers in a data center.