How Does an Air Conditioner Work
Air conditioners work in much the same way that a refrigerator does; by cooling the air in an area while also extracting the hot air from the area and removing it from the vicinity. However, unlike a refrigerator, an air conditioner must do its job on an entire house, does not need to cool the air to the same degree, and it does so with some larger, more powerful equipment.
An air conditioner seems to cool your home’s air, but it actually makes your home cooler by removing heat from the indoor air and transferring that heat outdoors. Heat is extracted from the home by passing indoor air across a refrigerant coil in the indoor unit. Refrigerant lines then carry the heat to the outdoor unit, where it is released into the outside air. The cooling cycle continues until the indoor temperature reaches the thermostat setting.
First, a couple of basic concepts: When you compress a gas, it gets warmer. If you have ever used a bicycle pump to inflate several bike tires or a car tire, you may notice the end of the pump gets hot. It gets that way because compressing the air heats it up. This is also why they put intercoolers on turbocharged engines, to cool down the compressed air, and why there are cooling fins on air compressors. When you un-compress, or expand compressed gas, it cools down because of the reverse of the principle stated above (look for info on the Ideal Gas Equation). If you use an aerosol can for more than a few seconds, you may notice that the can gets cooler because of this effect. A typical air conditioner uses a substance that is compressed, making it hot, which then passes through a radiator outside to be cooled by the air outside which is cooler than the compressed/heated stuff. The cooled compressed stuff is then expanded into another radiator where it cools off a lot as it expands. Ai
An air conditioner uses a process of heat transfer, similar to a refrigerator, to pull heat energy away from the air replacing it with cool air. The process also removes moisture from the air.
The drier air that AC produces also helps to keep us cool. We sweat so the moisture can evaporate from our skin as part of our bodies own heat transfer process. Drier air makes the evaporation process more efficient. The relatively high humidity that occurs with the hot weather here in Houston region makes the dryer air produced by AC an added bonus.
Today’s central air conditioning units are part of the entire heating, cooling and ventilation systems for your home or commercial building. Air is ventilated and filtered through the buildings duct work and the temperature control unit automatically decides when the A/C should turn on to cool the air down or the furnace to turn on to warm it up. Read More
