Necessary Considerations for Designing DC Architectures in Data Centers

As global policies are calling for more sustainable development of data center infrastructures and energy efficiency, a maturing data center industry is looking to build on the successful infrastructure optimization of the past decade. Alternative power distribution architectures remain an important avenue for data center electrical designers looking to decrease costs and increase efficiency. Architectures using direct current (DC) distribution provide a prospective simplification of the AC/DC/AC conversion stage required in a traditional double conversion UPS and have gained some traction. However, when making this change, there are 5 areas that require additional focus including power converter design, UPS bypass, isolation and earthing, DC fault modeling and studies, and protection selection. Appropriately addressing these considerations in DC architectures is not trivial, however it allows for better data center designs and a better view of the implications of considering DC during the design planning stage.