Grant: Idea to Innovation

With the exponential growth in internet technology, more and more data centers (including servers, data storage) have been built to process network traffic. These data centers consume considerable amounts of electrical energy. According to a report by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2006, data center consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hour (kWh), equivalent to 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption, or 5% of total U.S. household consumption, for a total electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. It was doubled from 2000. The report estimated that the energy consumption by data centers would nearly double again five years from 2006 (by 2011) to more than 100 billion kWh, representing $7.4 billion annual electricity cost. The peak load will increase from 7 gigawatts (GW) in 2006 to 12 GW by 2011. Therefore, it is critical to reduce the power loss in the data center power systems. A new technology, Non-Linear Noise Filter, has been proposed and its advantages have been verified at Queen's University. A patent has been filed for this technology. In this project, a new DC-DC converter prototype for data center power supply will be designed, built and tested. It will achieve 97.5% efficiency at 400V input, 12V / 100A output achieving power density of 61W per cubic inch. As compared with the state-of-art technology, the power loss will be reduced by 38.5% as compared with the current design. With this new technology, we can achieve highest conversion efficiency for data center power supply. It is expected that the new technology can reduce the data center energy consumption by 1.5% (or 1.5 billion kWh) and save $114 million electricity cost for data center in US, around $11 million in Canada each year.