Data Centers Air Cooled

Data center air cooling is the process of managing and dissipating the significant heat generated by high-density IT equipment — including servers, storage systems, and networking devices — using air as the primary heat transfer medium. As computing demands grow, maintaining optimal thermal conditions is critical to ensuring equipment reliability, operational efficiency, and longevity.

Modern data centers face stringent cooling requirements: server inlet temperatures must typically be maintained between 18–27°C (64–80°F), while overall cooling systems must handle heat loads ranging from tens of kilowatts (kW) in smaller facilities to several megawatts (MW) in hyperscale environments. Effective air cooling must also account for hot aisle/cold aisle containment, precise airflow management, and the ability to scale with increasing rack power densities.

At the heart of air-cooled designs are high-performance heat exchangers, which transfer heat from recirculating air to a cooling medium before it re-enters the facility floor.

General ThermoDynamics & Airtech solutions employ the latest aluminum Microchannel and Bar & Plate technologies across a range of fin configurations, delivering industry-leading thermal efficiency, reduced refrigerant charge, and a compact footprint — engineered to meet the demands of today’s most performance-intensive data center environments.

Typical applications

  • Cooling tower open-loop cooling isolation
  • Cooling and isolation with open-loop water (well, lake, river, brackish, salt, gray)
  • Free cooling with air or water
  • Chiller bypass
  • Air-cooled chiller (ACC) coils
  • Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) chilled water cooling coils
  • Fan wall coils
  • Chiller shell-and-tube heat exchangers
  • Refrigerant cooling and condensation
  • Backup power genset on-engine and remote cooling
  • In-row and rear-door chilled water-cooling coils
  • Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) condenser & evaporator coils and heat exchangers