PE retired, Fellow/Life Member ASHRAE
Keith Dunnavant’s journey with Munters began in 2007, when Munters acquired Des Champs Technologies, an innovative HVAC manufacturer of energy recovery, dehumidification, and evaporative cooling systems.
He began his career at Des Champs as a regional sales manager in 1993 and subsequently held positions as national accounts manager and national sales manager.
Keith’s initial work in data center cooling began in 1999 but was soon put on hold with the dot-com crash. By 2008, ASHRAE issued new thermal guidelines allowing warmer, room neutral air to be supplied to servers for cooling. This revision opened the door for new, energy efficient approaches for rejecting heat from data centers.
Dunnavant and colleagues began working on a new strategy they began calling an “Indirect Air-side Economizer” (IASE) that involves rejecting heat from recirculating data center air into a separate flow of ambient air, using an air-to-air heat exchanger that prevents the two airstreams from comingling and operates dry during cool weather, or in an optional “wet” indirect evaporative cooling mode during warm ambient conditions. The systems, marketed as OASIS or PVX, typically include supplemental DX or chilled water cooling. The approach most often utilizes polymer tube heat exchanger technology developed and patented by Munters/Des Champs.
The strategy is highly energy efficient and gained global interest after Keith’s article, titled “Indirect Air-side Economizer Cycle, Data Center Heat Rejection,” was published by the ASHRAE Journal in March 2011. Shortly thereafter he wrote a technical paper presented at the 2013 ASHRAE winter meeting, published in ASHRAE Transactions, titled “The impact of barometric pressure, temperature, and operating temperature difference on air-cooled data centers.” to help engineers understand the importance of using actual airflow (rather than standard airflow) in their calculations and also the significant impact of fan placement and fan heat. The IASE approach along with cooling systems using Munters direct evaporative cooling media, served as Munters’ entry into the data center cooling market.
