Conduit installation for a data centre
Advances in air-cooled chillers
Building code updates for mass timber
MARKET TRENDS DIGITAL HANDBOOK
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FEATURES
September 2024
Market Trends Handbook ccemag.com
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SPONSORED FEATURE Safe, Successful Fibreglass Conduit Installation
A major electrical contractor experienced a safe and successful fibreglass conduit installation, including prefabrication, for a data centre customer.
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Data Centres: Advances in Air-cooled Chillers
Many data centre developers and operators are faced with stringent sustainability goals, requiring them to find innovative ways to enhance energy efficiency, reduce water consumption and meet decarbonization milestones.
COVER IMAGE: CHAMPION FIBERGLASS
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Conversation: Building Code Updates for Mass Timber
With British Columbia’s decarbonization targets in mind, RJC Engineers principal Grant Newfield, P.Eng., is focusing on making buildings more sustainable. We spoke with him about the significance of recent code updates.
SAFE, SUCCESSFUL FIBREGLASS CONDUIT INSTALLATION
A major electrical contractor experienced a safe and successful fibreglass conduit installation, including prefabrication, for a data centre customer.
Challenge
A large data centre project in Virginia’s ‘data centre alley’ required miles of electrical conduit, including duct banks, to be installed on a tight, strict timeline. The customer insisted on high-performance materials and a cost-efficient installation.
The contractor, Rosendin Electric, was already an expert in below-ground work for data centres, but this was its first time installing large quantities of fibreglass conduit.
Specifications for the comprehensive installation included 25 miles of 4-, 5- and 6-in. heavy-wall 90s for medium-voltage telecommunications and house transformer duct banks.
Solution
The data centre customer evaluated both fibreglass and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) conduit for the project.
Fiberglass was preferred over PVC for the following reasons:
• 66% less weight.
• Quicker installation, due to the lower weight.
• Safer installation, due to less time in the trench.
• Nearly 50% less cost, at the time.
• Even greater savings in labour costs.
• Approximately 25% shorter lead time, which would help the project stay on schedule.
The project used Champion Fiberglass’ Duct and Elbows. The materials, compliant with the United States-MexicoCanada Agreement (USMCA), proved budget-friendly.
"Prefabricated assembly helped shorten installation."
Results
Many advantages were realized for this project, including reduced manpower, smaller equipment and safer installation due to the conduit’s light weight, fault resistance and increased distance between supports.
Additionally, prefabricated assembly by Champion helped shorten the conduit’s installation process tremendously.
Pre-assembled, lightweight duct banks were delivered and then easily placed into the trench with a forklift—which would not have been possible with the heavier PVC conduit.
This project also involved a high level of customer support. Champion provided guidance to help the contractor become familiar with fibreglass conduit for installation. There were many touch points, including conference calls, samples and customizations. Champion regularly goes this extra mile for customers.
In the end, the total labour savings were 60%; productivity increased by 63% over PVC; and the project was completed on time and on budget.
No burn-through eliminates elbow repairs
Lower material and installation costs
Fault resistance makes repairing cables easy
Durable and corrosion-resistant for project longevity
Champion Duct® Electrical Conduit Elbow
Advances in Air-cooled Chillers
By Charles Casey
Many data centre developers and operators are faced with stringent sustainability goals, requiring them to find innovative ways to enhance energy efficiency, reduce water consumption and meet decarbonization milestones.
As the constr uction of data centres continues to grow, developers are leaning into strategies that can reduce construction times and allow facilities to expand and launch at rapid rates.
They often require heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems that can be stock-designed and are easy to repeat across multiple facilities in different regions.
These priorities can feel at odds, but advances in cooling systems are providing solutions to help developers and operators reach both their business and environmental goals.
Redefining cooling requirements
Today, the average data centre requires a chilled water temperature of 18 to 22 C, while trending towards 30 C, due to the adoption of liquid- cooled servers. In the past, data centres relied on water-cooled chillers and other industry technologies to satisfy these demanding requirements. In the past five years or so, however, air-cooled chillers have been widely adopted for their positive impacts on system design and project execution.
While water-cooled chillers can provide reliable cooling, for example, they present challenges for facilities located in regions with limited water supplies and/or with regulations that limit water use. Since these factors vary from region to region, watercooled systems can limit flexibility for operators who must replicate building system designs as part of their expansion strategy. Today’s air-cooled chillers are now enabling HVAC systems to be designed around these goals.
Greater efficiency
Air-cooled chiller technology has significantly advanced in recent years, becoming sufficiently reliable, efficient and flexible for the demands of high-performance data centres.
A key feature is the use of magnetic bearing technology. When
applied to the air-cooled chiller, magnetic drivelines can enable off-design mechanical cooling performance approaching free-cooling chiller operating performance in economizer mode.
Magnetic bearing drivelines allow the
chiller to leverage cold ambient air and reduce power consumption. Compared to traditional air-cooled screw chillers, magnetic bearing air-cooled chillers can improve design and part-load efficiency within typical data centre conditions. Additional oil management components are not required within the refrigeration circuit.
Similarly, air-cooled screw chillers have been engineered to drive sustainability within data centres. Variable-speed drive (VSD) and air-to-liquid free-cooling technologies enable hybrid cooling to increase part-load efficiency year-round.
Typically, free-cooling chillers use variable-speed compressors that shut down when ambient temperatures permit. Today’s advances rely on intelligent flow-control bypass valves to operate between mechanical, hybrid and free-cooling modes to meet the required capacity.
Scaling to expansion
As the demand for data centres drives their rapid expansion, owners and operators are often challenged to define building systems well in advance of actual facility construction. In many cases, these decisions must be made even before the
location has been determined.
Designing HVAC systems for repeatability and scalability is critical to keep pace with these parameters. Today’s aircooled chillers provide a flexible, high-efficiency, repeatable solution.
Energy-efficient advances, such as the aforementioned magnetic bearing compressor technology, have improved unit performance while reducing a chiller’s footprint and weight.
Air-cooled chillers are ideal for systems where sustainability, efficiency, redundancy and scalability are paramount. They can be easily deployed in a phased approach to meet the growing needs of hyper-scale and co-location data centres. These units also offer the flexibility of being installed outdoors, either on a rooftop or on a grade, increasing the usable space within the data centre footprint.
Purpose-built for today and tomorrow
As demand for data centres continues to increase, so too does the demand for purpose-built cooling systems. Understanding customers’ requirements and industr y trends, while making investments in the right technologies, is critical to meeting both current and future needs.
Data centre owners and operators require scalable HVAC systems that can be quickly installed for a multitude of facilities, across various locations. They are task ed with achieving higher rack density, providing sustainable solutions and understanding evolving regulations. Air-cooled magnetic bearing chillers are designed to support these tasks, through higher efficiency, refrigerants with low global warming potential (GWP) and reduced embedded carbon. These systems can meet high-capacity cooling requirements with unwavering reliability while minimizing consumption of energy and water.
Charles Casey is Johnson Controls’ senior sales engineer for data centres
Building Code Updates for Mass Timber
With British Columbia’s decarbonization targets in mind, RJC Engineers principal Grant Newfield, P.Eng., is focusing on making buildings more sustainable. In March, updates to the B.C. Building and Fire Codes came into effect that allow for taller mass-timber buildings, up to 18 storeys. We spoke with Newfield about the significance of these changes.
How are code updates reflecting the increased use of mass timber?
For a long time, there was a high level of public awareness of fires involving dimensional lumber in stick-frame buildings up to four or six storeys. Most of these fires occurred during construction, not after drywalling, but they gave wood a negative connotation.
When w e started developing provisions for encapsulated mass timber, which came over from Europe in 2009 and 2010, we made sure to differentiate it from dimensional lumber because it performed very differently in a fire.
One of mass timber’s intrinsic properties is it takes a long time to get ignited. It’s like when you put a big log into a fireplace with nothing else to start a fire. You can hold a torch to it, but you can’t get that big log going!
As mass-timber construction started to be demonstrated in buildings that met the same fire-safety requirements as for steel and concrete, people became comfortable
with it and the public perception changed.
Around 2019, the B.C. government mandated provisions to allow mass-timber construction up to 12 storeys, as part of a push to get more wood into buildings, both for sustainability reasons and to support the local forestry industry. Meanwhile, national codes were starting to move in the same direction to limit carbon emissions. The 2020 N ational Building Code (NBC) adopted B.C.’s provisions for encapsulated mass-timber construction up to 12 storeys. And now the 2023 B.C. Building Code, which has just been adopted, is in turn based on the 2020 NBC.
How does mass timber help meet sustainability targets?
Wood is a low-embodied carbon material. While concrete and steel require energy-intensive processes for their production, wood is har vested at low energy intensity. It’s a lighter material and it sequesters carbon.
The first wooden buildings were post-and-beam structures. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) can span in two directions like plywood, so for a straightforward residential building, you can work with the architect on a grid layout and specify point-supported CLT with no beams. That’s a very efficient approach, reducing both the amount of materials in the building and the cost of constructing it.
What needs to change for mass-timber buildings to become taller?
The provisions for 12 storeys required 15 minutes of encapsulation, which meant you needed two layers of drywall. You could either drywall even further to provide full fire protection or allow some charring of the timber, as long as you came up with a two-hour burn fire assembly.
“One of mass timber’s intrinsic properties is it takes a long time to get ignited.”
In 2023, a joint provincial group between B.C. and Quebec wrote a proposed change form for the NBC to allow mass timber up to 18 storeys. That change was reviewed by the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes (CBHCC) and went out for public comment. It could become part of the 2025 NBC, but the provinces might not wait that long—they could implement changes ahead of time.
The new provisions for 18 storeys require more encapsulation, getting us from 15 minutes up to 70 minutes. You add more drywall the higher you go. It’s a logical approach that follows provisions that have already been adopted in the U.S., in the International Building Code (IBC).
Grant Newfield.