Abstract:With its advantages in cooling efficiency and cost, the cold channel closed system is more and more used in the construction of new data centers. However, the closed channel system will turn the originally open channels between data center cabinets into narrow spaces with restricted ventilation. When the main combustibles in the data center catch fire, the accumulated hot smoke and gas in the closed channel cannot be timely discharged, seriously threatening the safety of data center equipment and personnel. At present, there is a paucity of experimental data and theoretical basis for the fire hazard of cables commonly used in data centres. In this paper, Pyrosim software was used to establish a full-size physical model of the data center room in the cold closed channel, and FDS software was used to establish a full-size fire model to simulate different fire source locations, so as to analyze the changes of fire parameters such as smoke spread rate, visibility and temperature distribution. The results show that when a fire occurs under the floor (maximum heat release rate reaches 2000 kW), the smoke would fill the whole machine room more quickly due to the influence of the special air conditioning airflow and floor than the cabinet fire. The visibility at the safety exit measuring point reached 0 m, 60 s earlier than the fire at the inside of the cabinet. At the same time, affected by the air conditioning airflow and perforated tiles, the temperature at the inside of the cabinet quickly reaches the critical value where the fire hazard is much greater. The results could provide important theoretical support for the fire protection system design of the cold channel of closed data center.