Industrial Assessment Center Program

The work described in this report was performed under the direction of the Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) at University of Texas at Arlington. The IAC at The University of Texas at Arlington is managed by Rutgers University under agreement with the United States Department of Energy Office of Industrial Technology, which financially supports the program. The objective of the IAC is to identify, evaluate, and recommend, through analysis of an industrial plant’s operations, opportunities to conserve energy and prevent pollution, thereby reducing the associated costs. IAC team members visit and survey the plant. Based upon observations made in the plant, preventive/corrective actions are recommended. At all times we try to offer specific and quantitative recommendations of cost savings, energy conservation, and pollution prevention to the plants we serve

Proceedings of IPACK'03 The Pacific Rim/ASME International Electronic Packaging Technical Conference and Exhibition

ABSTRACT Today's data centers are designed for handling heat densities of 1000W/m 2 at the room level. Trends indicate that these heat densities will exceed 3000W/m 2 in the near future. As a result, cooling of data centers has emerged as an area of increasing importance in electronics thermal management. With these high heat loads, data center layout and design cannot rely on intuitive design of air distribution and requires analytical tools to provide the necessary insight to the problem. These tools can also be used to optimize the layout of the room to improve energy efficiency in the data center. In this paper, first an under floor analysis is done to find an optimized layout based on flow distribution through perforated tiles, then a complete Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model of the data center facility is done to check for desired cooling and air flow distribution throughout the room. A robust methodology is proposed which helps for fast, easy, efficient modeling and analysis of data center design. Results are displayed to provide some guidance on the layout and design of data center. The resulting design approach is very simple and well suited for the energy efficient design of complex data centers and server farms

Solar Assisted Household Clothes Dryer

Energy savings for domestic appliances have been an emphasis for several years. The efficiencies of several appliances have improved dramatically as a result of this attention. Refrigerator, water heater, and washing machine energy consumptions have been reduced. One appliance has not experienced significant improvement, the clothes dryer. Typical household clothes dryers use large amounts of electricity or natural gas to heat air that is circulated with the clothes. The energy to heat the air is a function of the amount of air and heat needed to remove moisture from the clothes. Using solar heat to augment or replace the other energy sources can provide significant energy savings. Conventional house construction includes features which collect and concentrate solar energy in the air occupying the attic space. Typical home design provides a roof which functions as a large area solar energy collector. Many roofing materials have solar absorption of 80% or more. Insulation of the roof decking is uncommon so that absorbed solar heat conducts through and heats the attic air. Through simple, low-cost ducting and minor modification of a clothes dryer air inlet, this energy resource becomes available for use. This study evaluates the potential energy savings of using solar-heated attic air as a clothes dryer air source. Considering house construction as well as seasonal and regional climate variations, attic air can augment and may fully replace utility energy as the heat source for drying air during daylight hours when solar energy is incident on the roof. The energy savings can be up to 3.5 kilowatt hours (or the heating equivalent for natural gas) for each dryer load.</jats:p

Removing the Hot-Spots in High Power Devices Using the Thermoelectric Cooler and Micro Heat Pipe

Due to localized high heat fluxes, hot-spots are created in silicon chips. Cooling of the hot-spots is one of the major thermal challenges in today’s integrated circuit (IC) industry. Many researches have been conducted to find ways to cool hot-spots using different techniques as uniform heating is highly desired. This paper focuses on cooling of hot-spot using conventional thermoelectric cooler (Melcor_CP1.0-31-05L.1) and a micro heat pipe. A chip package with conventional integrated heat spreader and heat sink was designed. Hot-spot was created at the center of the silicon die with background heat at rest of the area. The heat flux on the hot-spot was much greater than rest of the area. Forced convection was used to cool IC package, temperature was observed at active side of the silicon die. After that a copper conductor was used to take away heat directly from the hot-spot of the silicon die to the other end of the conductor which was cooled using the thermoelectric cooler. Finally the conductor was replaced by a heat pipe and a comparison between three cases was done to study the cooling performance using the commercial software, ANSYS Icepak. The effect of trench on silicon die was also studied. In this paper the United States Patent, Patent No. US 6,581,388 B2, Jun. 24 2000 [8] as shown in Fig. 1 (b) was modified by replacing the conductor with a micro heat pipe to solve the hot-spots problem in electronic packaging.</jats:p