<p>In the field of Mechanical Engineering, vibration is a common factor of external interference. However, as long as in the occasion of workpiece moving and operating, vibration is often an inevitable side effect. Take data server for example, the main inner energy-intensive components in server machine are CPU, GPU, HDD and so on. In order to decrease the waste heat produced in server operating, ODM and OEM companies install a high-speed radiator fan in server as a countermeasure. However, as the development of Industry 4.0 and 5th Generation Mobile Networks, modern usage of computing has led to increasing file sizes and demands for high performance in real-time services, these technologies tend to need supports of server to maximize their effectiveness. Therefore, people’s demands of the effectiveness of server become more and more strict. It also means that power dissipation of each component keeps rising; the side effect of high-power dissipation is high waste heat. Therefore, ODM and OEM companies keep raising the speed of fan to restrain the inner accumulation of waste heat in server. Although the fan takes away waste heat, it also leads to additional vibration, which severely influences the I/O performance of inner HDD. The main cause is that while HDD is reading and writing information, external vibration disturbance causes disks and Read/Write heads can’t be corresponding to the right position. In this research, contributions of active vibration control system for fans in the data server. The result has already utilized the way of active vibration isolation. Through accelerometer as a sensor, PZT actuator and myRIO with FPGA Module are as a feedback controller and LabVIEW serves as a control program to complete a feasible active vibration control system. For testing, we take 2U rack server which with 12 HDD bays to experiment. Active vibration control experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed active vibration control strategy is effective. As the results, this active vibration control system can effectively attenuate structural vibration from fans in the server. Learning through the measurement data from the sensor which in the HDD, we can confirm that this system can attenuated about eighty percent vibration for slot 0-3. However, the vibration for slot 4-11 are remain almost unreduced. Our continuing efforts will further investigate the insight of these uncontrolled vibrations, if and how these vibrations might be suppressed using this system or another way. Our ongoing work also includes the use passive vibration control through magnetic damping.</p>

Active-Passive Vibration Control for Fans in the Data Server

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ISPS/ISPS2021/volume/84799

ASME 2021 Information Storage and Processing Systems (ISPS2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.