How does air conditioning work?
When the summer time arrives people start to seek the comfort of air conditioning, however like power lines and water towers air conditioning is something we see every day but pay little attention too.
Air conditioners come in various sizes, capacities and prices.
Air conditioning uses exactly the same process as is found inside your normal household fridge except an air conditioning unit rather than cooling just the insulated space within a fridge is used to cool a space such as a room.
The process of taking heat from one place and transporting it another is achieved by the means of special chemicals that are able to change from a liquid to a gas easily, it is this chemical that is used to transfer latent heat from inside a building to the outside.
The reaction taking place is the Freon evaporation cycle.
The way it works is a compressor compresses the incoming cool Freon gas causing it to super heat and increase in pressure.
It then enters the coil allowing it to cool down and eventually returns back to liquid form.
The liquid then passes through an expansion valve forcing it to turn back into a gas form.
The gas then travels down the gas line of the air conditioning system and into the indoor unit, it then travels around the coil in the indoor unit allowing it to capture heat therefore removing it from the space within the building.
As well as capturing latent heat out of the air in the space, the indoor unit will also contain filters designed to capture dust, pollen, mould spores and other allergens as well as smoke and everyday dirt found in the air.
The level of filtration can be increased to the user’s needs, filtration is especially important for people with allergies.
The Unit also acts a dehumidifier by removing the excess moisture in the air which is uses to cool down the unit before been eject from the unit through a gravity drain or by a small pump.
The humidity of a building is important not just from an allergy sense but also because excess humidity can bring rise to wood boring insects such as the death watch and longhorn which left unchecked can lead to structural damage.
The above is air conditioning in its most basic form, the technology is now been used in many other applications such as water heating systems (Daiken Altherma) and Geothermal units.
