ASHRAE

Overview

ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) is a global professional society that develops standards, guidelines, and research for HVAC, refrigeration, and building systems. ASHRAE's thermal guidelines for data processing environments have been foundational to data center design for decades, defining recommended and allowable temperature and humidity envelopes for IT equipment operation. The organization's climate data, including hourly weather bin datasets, is a standard input for data center cooling system design and energy modeling.

In the context of the OCP Data Center Facilities community, ASHRAE serves as both a data source and a parallel standards body. ASHRAE's hourly weather bin data is used as the foundational climate input for cooling analysis, enabling engineers to model chiller performance, free cooling hours, and energy efficiency across different geographic locations. ASHRAE is also actively engaged in discussions around flush velocity standards for liquid cooling systems, with proposals reaching up to 6 meters per second -- a topic of direct relevance to the TCS commissioning and cleaning procedures being standardized under OCP.