Omei Turnbull 1199597344|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
The new design brief envisions the telecommunications center becoming the Internet Service Provider for the Achham district, providing Internet access to 50% of the population (currently about 250,000 and growing) by 2005. Although they are planning on installing only a single server at this time, they ask that the building design support three servers. Servers such as these are generally smaller than the home PC (without monitor or keyboard), so space is not an issue. But maintaining an acceptable operating environment (in particular, temperature and humidity) is going to take some careful planning.
Computer electronics can be designed with different temperature operating range requirements, but 10 - 35 degrees Centigrade, with 20 - 80% percent humidity is typical. Assuming the center has thick adobe walls and protection against radiative loss to the night sky in winter, maintaining 10+ degrees in the winter should be easy just by keeping the server closet closed during normal operation. The heat generated from the servers themselves should keep the temperatures well over the minimum even if the building as a whole drops below that temperature. (Which I don't think it will.)
Maintaining adequately low temperature and humidity in the summer is going to be much more difficult. Substantial ventilation is going to be needed in the server closet to draw off the generated heat. But since the outside temperatures routinely routinely exceeds 35 degrees, simply blowing air over the servers is not going to suffice.
My thought is that we should have the floor of the building raised off the ground, with a substantial volume of air that is shielded by the building. If the soil at the site is conducive to making the adobe bricks, we could excavate the ground under the future building as part of the brick making process. The effect should be that during the heat of the day, the air underneath the building should be substantially cooler than the ambient air, and we can draw it up through a vent in the server room floor, pass it over the equipment and then vent it out through the roof.
I think this should help mitigate the humidity issue as well. If the ambient humidity is very high, the cool air accumulating under the building at night will reach 100% relative humidity and some of the the moisture will condense out. (Think of a cave.) When the air is heated as it passes through the server closet, its relative humidity will drop, so that it can keep the electronics adequately dry. Essentially, the process should act as a dehumidifier, leaving the extracted water in the cellar.
