#1 Data Center Water Treatment Provider

Data Center Water Treatment Cooling Still

Since 1999, we’ve provided green treatment solutions and blacker bottom lines.

Data Center Water Treatment for Effective Cooling

Your trusted partner for data center water treatment, Chemstar WATER, has been providing solutions to many hyperscale and colocation providers. Our water treatment solutions include modular water treatment equipment, cooling water treatment, and microbiological control services including Legionella pneumophila mitigation. Our mission is to support the fast and agile deployment of data centers as well as achieve excellent water and power usage effectiveness during the operational phase.

Why Data Centers use Water for Cooling?

The volumetric heat capacity of water is roughly 3300 times greater than air. Thus, utilizing water is far more efficient when it comes to heat transfer. For example, in order to cool one typical 8kW server rack, you will need only 2 m3/hour of water as opposed to 3200 m3/hour of air. As a result, water is the most cost-effective way to cool data centers.

Why Data Centers need Water Treatment?

We are witnessing water scarcity problem developing in front of our eyes and it is now becoming even more critical to be water conscious while still utilizing it for cooling. The good news is that data centers can utilize this cost-effective medium with virtually no environmental or community impact with well-established data water treatment practices. Although the “water footprint” is complex, controlling and reducing water usage is quite simple.

Data center cooling systems use water evaporation to reject heat. The “blowdown”, unevaporated water, which is high in minerals (high conductivity), is flushed away and replaced with fresh water or water “make-up.” Regardless of direct or indirect evaporative cooling systems, managing the cycle of concentration is critical and the most cost-effective solution. The cycle of concentration refers to the concentration of sold impurities in recirculating water. A high cycle saves water but creates scale build-up that may reduce cooling efficiency, adversely affecting the “power usage effectiveness” (PUE). A low cycle discharges blowdown prematurely, using more make-up water to compensate.

Each cooling system sump operates independently. Some data center campuses have hundreds of sumps. From the data center water treatment perspective, monitoring and controlling each is the best approach to achieve the optimum cycles of concentration. The cost of monitoring and control is usually negligible compared to the water and energy savings. Data center operators can reduce their water use significantly with strict monitoring and control by themselves or by companies like Chemstar WATER.

How Chemstar WATER helps Data Centers Water Cooling?

One way to reduce water’s scaling tendency is to attack the root cause of the problem. Water treatment equipment, such as reverse osmosis, electrodialysis reversal, or capacitive deionization, effectively reduces the mineral concentration in the water. Chemstar WATER provides many options to its data center customers depending on the water quality and need.

At Chemstar WATER, we provide continuous water testing and analysis to help you run your cooling systems at the highest possible cycles bringing in the utmost water usage effectiveness (WUE) as well as power water usage effectiveness (PUE). We assess water and energy usage to identify the most efficient method and minimize environmental and community impact. We also help our customers maximize use of free-air cooling systems that cool servers with outside air without using any water. During the instances when the water quality changes drastically, for example from surface water to groundwater, or vice versa, Chemstar WATER provides temporary or permanent water treatment equipment.

Chemstar WATER also provides on-going water testing, analysis and treatment for Legionella (hyperlink), especially for Direct Evaporative (Adiabatic) Cooling systems. It is critical to use safe and environmentally friendly biocides as the direct evaporative systems will provide the air all the way to the server room. Chemstar WATER provides proprietary solutions to the scaling of the fill media that extends the life of the media.

Finally, we also help our data center customers validate their drift eliminators on a regular basis to ensure that the cooling systems are working effectively without any carry over to the server room.

Read more on our advancements in data center water treatment in our case studies.

And hear from our CEO, Cem Candir, about the future of water and the important role it plays in data center water management and energy savings. View the highlights from Data Center Frontier Voices of the Industry:

Making Your Data Center Water Positive