Keppel Data Centres, SLNG and NUS Engineering

Common Goal Inspires Collaboration Between NUS Engineering, Keppel and SLNG

NUS Engineering joins forces with the Keppel Data Centres Holdings Pte Ltd (Keppel

Data Centres) and Singapore LNG

Corporation Pte Ltd (SLNG) to develop a new, energy-efficient and costeffective cooling technology for data centres.

The five-member team from NUS Engineering, Keppel Data Centres and SLNG under the leadership of Dean’s Chair and Associate Professor Praveen Linga will develop a prototype of a new cooling medium that can efficiently store and carry cold energy from SLNG Terminal to the various data centres as well as circulate the energy within the cooling loop in each data centre to achieve effective cooling.

In conventional chilling technology, a liquid coolant – usually chilled water – is used to cool the air in data centres. Large volumes of water are required to supply chilled water in the circulation loop to carry out cooling as water has limited thermal capacity. Consequently, to generate adequate pumping loads to maintain the flow of chilled water in the cooling system, a large infrastructure is required.

In this project, the research team will explore use of the Semiclathrate Thermal Energy Carrier System (ScTECS) which can potentially enable data centres to improve their power usage effectiveness by 20 percent. The footprint of the cooling infrastructure could also be significantly reduced – saving space and construction costs, and enabling more sustainable and compact data centres in the future.

The team also intends to harness and utilise LNG cold energy from LNG re-gasification terminals and use it to offset the energy demands in data centres. Cold energy generated from LNG re-gasification could be stored in phase change materials and distributed to data centres for cooling purposes.

The process prototype demonstrating the cooling technology with a capacity of one tonne per day will be designed, built and operated for demonstration by 2022 at NUS.

The research project is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Green Data Centre Research Programme.

“Improving the efficiency of the cooling system can result in significant energy savings and reduce the carbon footprint of data centres. Therefore, in this project, we aim to demonstrate a novel way of storing cold energy release from the liquified Natural Gas (LNG) re-gasification process and using it to cool data centres efficiently.”

– Assoc Prof Praveen Linga, NUS Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

From left, Senior Engineer Tee Jackson from Keppel Data Centres, Sreekala Kumar from IncubateKeppel Manager, Senior Development Engineer Ho Wai Ying from Singapore LNG, Associate Professor Praveen Linga and Professor Iftekhar A. Karimi from NUS Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will collaborate to develop more efficient cooling technology for data centres. (Photo credit: Keppel Corporation)