Service
Precision Cooling & Data Centre Design | Australia
End-to-end thermal design for new and brownfield data centres — load calculation, redundancy, airflow modelling, vendor specification.
Precision cooling design starts with the room thermal load — sensible heat from IT equipment, lighting, occupants, and external gain — and works backward to redundancy class, equipment type (DX/CDW/CHW), unit count, airflow strategy (perimeter vs in-row vs containment), and BMS integration.
CRAC Services provides full thermal design services for new-build and brownfield Australian data centres, server rooms, healthcare facilities, and industrial process environments. Designs are documented to AS/NZS 1668 for ventilation and ASHRAE TC 9.9 for thermal envelope, with CFD modelling available for high-density layouts.
Our designs are vendor-agnostic at the concept stage — selection between Vertiv, Schneider, Stulz, Daikin and others happens at the equipment specification phase based on lifecycle cost, parts availability, and client preference.
Scope
Our service
includes
- 01Sensible heat load calculation
- 02Redundancy class definition (N, N+1, 2N)
- 03Cooling-system topology selection (DX/CDW/CHW)
- 04Hot-aisle / cold-aisle / containment strategy
- 05CFD airflow modelling (where required)
- 06Vendor specification and tender support
- 07BMS / DCIM integration design
- 08Energy-efficiency optimisation (NCC Section J, NABERS)
- 09Project hand-off to commissioning
Equipment
Equipment types
we service
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate sensible heat load for a server room?
Take the IT load draw in watts (from UPS output meter or rack PDUs), add lighting and occupancy contribution (~5W/m² lighting, 80W per occupant), add external gain (depends on room construction and adjacent spaces — usually 10-15% of IT for an internal room). Convert watts to kW. Add 25% growth headroom and round up to the nearest practical CRAC unit size. We can refine this with a full CFD model where layout efficiency matters.
When should I consider liquid cooling?
Liquid cooling becomes economically attractive above ~30kW per rack — typical thresholds for AI training, GPU clusters, and HPC nodes. Below that, optimised air cooling with hot-aisle containment usually wins on capex. Our liquid cooling consultancy can model the crossover point for your specific workload mix.
Do you provide tender support?
Yes. Once concept design is complete we can prepare a vendor-neutral specification, manage tender returns (with technical scoring), and provide award-stage recommendations. We do not earn vendor commissions — our recommendation reflects best fit for your design, not channel economics.