Engineering heat out of the data hall
Modern data centres demand thermal engineering that is technically precise, energy-efficient, and built for rack densities that didn't exist five years ago. At Barak and Brazos Engineering, we deliver integrated HVAC design solutions across hyperscale, colocation, edge, and AI-class data centre facilities — with a strong focus on cooling reliability, PUE optimisation, ASHRAE TC 9.9 compliance, and scalable thermal architecture. Every solution we engineer is developed to reduce thermal risk, hold inlet temperatures within envelope under N-1, and support efficient delivery from concept through commissioning.
— Data Centre Infrastructure · Power Distribution Equipment · Industrial Automation
Chiller Plant Design
Full chiller plant engineering — water-cooled, air-cooled, and magnetic-bearing centrifugal selections. Primary-secondary and variable primary hydraulic schemes, thermal storage integration, free-cooling and waterside economisation. Sized for N+1 and N+2 redundancy with concurrent maintainability built into the hydraulic topology, not bolted on.
Cooling Towers & Heat Rejection
Open-circuit, closed-circuit, and hybrid (adiabatic) cooling tower selection and arrangement. Drift eliminator specification, basin chemistry integration with water treatment, plume abatement where required, and acoustic treatment to satisfy site noise envelopes. Coordinated with makeup water and blowdown systems.
CRAH / CRAC & Precision Cooling
Selection and arrangement of CRAH units, in-row coolers, rear-door heat exchangers, and overhead cooling for white-space and grey-space. EC fan controls, return air management, hot/cold aisle containment integration, and supply air temperature reset strategies aligned to ASHRAE A1–A4 envelopes.
Liquid Cooling & High-Density
Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) selection, secondary fluid network design, and facility water interface for direct-to-chip and immersion deployments. Pressure and temperature management for the technology cooling system (TCS), fluid chemistry, leak detection, and N+1 sizing for AI/HPC rack densities of 50–200 kW.
CFD & Airflow Analysis
Computational fluid dynamics modelling for white-space airflow, hot-spot identification, recirculation analysis, and containment validation. Used during design to size return air paths and during commissioning to validate inlet temperatures across the room before tenants take occupancy.
Mechanical Balance of Plant
Chilled water and condenser water piping, pump stations, expansion tanks, side-stream filtration, glycol management, makeup water control, and instrumentation tie-ins to BMS and DCIM. The hydraulic system that keeps the chillers fed — designed once, properly, instead of debugged in commissioning.
HVAC services, end-to-end
All disciplines. One roof.
Data centre HVAC is rarely just HVAC. It pulls electrical for chiller and pump loads, water treatment for cooling tower makeup, BMS for sequence-of-operations, structural for plinths and screening, and BIM for the actual coordination. We house every discipline that HVAC touches internally — working to one quality standard and one delivery schedule.
01
Mechanical
Thermal load calculations, equipment selection, hydraulic design, pump sizing, expansion and side-stream systems, refrigerant management.
02
Controls & BMS
Sequence-of-operations, control loop tuning, BMS architecture, integration with DCIM, EPMS and leak detection — written to actually be commissionable.
03
Electrical
Mechanical load schedules, VFD sizing, MCC integration, harmonic mitigation, grounding for variable-speed drives, generator pickup sequencing.
04
Piping & CFD
Chilled water and condenser water hydraulics, ASME B31.9 piping, expansion analysis, supports, and CFD modelling for white-space airflow.
05
Civil & Structural
Equipment plinths, mechanical yard layout, screening, vibration isolation, cooling tower foundations to IBC & ASCE 7 seismic and wind loads.
01
Conceptual & FEED
Cooling topology selection — air vs liquid vs hybrid, CRAH vs in-row, water vs air-cooled chillers. PUE targets reverse-engineered into a thermal architecture. Site-specific wet-bulb analysis and CAPEX/OPEX bands before commitment.
02
Detailed Mechanical Engineering
Full P&ID development, equipment datasheets, hydraulic calculations, control narratives, and N+1 / 2N redundancy verification. HAZOP participation and action closeout. Documentation formatted to your standards, not ours.
03
Multidisciplinary Detail Design
Mechanical, electrical, controls, piping, structural and BIM developed concurrently and coordinated in-house — no sub-consultant federation drama. One quality review cycle covers every discipline that touches the cooling system.
04
Commissioning & Lvl 5 Support
IST scripting, integrated systems testing support, CFD-based commissioning validation, BMS tuning, and as-built redlining. We stay through Level 5 commissioning — not a one-off handover before pull-the-plug testing starts.
From concept to construction-ready.
We can enter at any phase and integrate directly with your programme. Most clients bring us in at FEED or detailed design — the earlier the better.
01
Data Centre Context, Built In
HVAC for a data centre is not HVAC for an office tower. There is no comfort-cooling logic, no occupancy schedule, no diversity factor. The load is 24/7, the inlet envelope is non-negotiable, and N+1 isn't a code box — it's the SLA. We design for that reality from line one.
02
Liquid Cooling Without the Hype
Direct-to-chip and immersion are real engineering disciplines now, not slideware. We've engineered CDU loops, secondary fluid networks and facility water interfaces for AI clusters — and we'll tell you honestly when air still wins and when it stops.
03
Multidisciplinary Without the Coordination Tax
Mechanical, electrical, controls, piping, structural and BIM — all in-house. No sub-consultant handoffs. No interface drawings that contradict each other. No three-week wait for a structural review of a 600-tonne cooling tower foundation.
04
US & ASHRAE Code Fluency
ASHRAE 90.1 and TC 9.9 for thermal envelope, ASHRAE 62.1 for ventilation, ASME B31.9 for piping, NFPA 70 / NEC for power, IBC and ASCE 7 for civil and structural. Every engineer on your project works to the code the AHJ expects — and the standard the operator audits to.
Not a generalist. Not a handoff risk.
We built our HVAC practice inside data centre infrastructure engineering. The thermal constraints are different here — sub-second cooling response, aggressive PUE targets, AI rack densities that break old assumptions, and a regulatory environment that increasingly cares how much water you evaporate. We know them.
HVAC engineering you don't have to manage
Scoping a greenfield chiller plant for a hyperscale campus, retrofitting an air-cooled hall for liquid-cooled GPU racks, or running a CFD audit on a colocation hot-spot — we'd like to talk. Most engagements start with a one-hour scoping call and a look at your current heat balance. No deck, no pre-sales theatre.