An optimization control strategy for air-cooled precision air conditioning system in base stations and analysis of its energy-saving potential

This paper proposes a dynamic optimization operation control strategy for an air conditioning system that combines natural cooling with vapor compression refrigeration for communication base stations. By adjusting the supply air temperature (tas) and air volume (ma), it aims to minimize the energy consumption of the air conditioning system under different outdoor temperature conditions. An air conditioning load and energy consumption calculation model is established to compute the annual hourly air conditioning energy consumption for both the traditional and optimized strategies. The results show that there exist optimal air volumes and optimal supply air temperatures under different outdoor temperatures, which results in the lowest air conditioning energy consumption, and these optimal solutions are related to the outdoor temperature. Under the annual hourly outdoor temperature conditions in Beijing, when the heat generation of the base station servers is 15 kW, for the traditional strategy with a fixed supply air temperature of 20 ℃, the annual average base station overall coefficient of performance (S-COPann) is 2.53, while the optimization strategy raises the S-COPannto 2.78, reducing the total air conditioning energy consumption by 9%.