Case Study: Swanson Rink validates data center air cooling conversion with Datacor Fathom

Swanson Rink balances 24 duct branches with Datacor Fathom

The customer, Swanson Rink, was tasked with converting a high-rise office building into a data center and needed to reuse the existing, vastly oversized duct system for a much lower airflow. Their challenge was to determine how to balance the new, reduced airflow requirements across 24 floors both initially and as the load diminished over time, ensuring the furthest ducts would not be starved. They used Datacor's Fathom software for pipe flow modeling to address this.

Using Datacor's Fathom, the engineer modeled the entire system with control valves to represent the balancing dampers. After achieving the desired flow, these were replaced with standard valves set to specific "K" values, which allowed them to simulate and confirm that airflow would decrease proportionally at reduced total flow rates without needing constant rebalancing. This analysis by Datacor's product proved the financial viability of reusing the existing ductwork and would have been nearly impossible to perform accurately using hand calculations.

Swanson Rink