An air conditioner is an important component of every room, especially where you spend most of your time like office. Air conditioning (AC) is a system that is used in de-humidifying and extracting heat from a given area. Basically, there are two main applications of these systems, the comfort, and process. The main reason for comfort applications is providing comforting for individuals inside any room or building in exceptional cold or hot weather.
So, how exactly does air conditioner actually work? Let us find out:
Both the refrigerators and air conditioners work the same way. The only difference is that the air conditioner can cool right from just a room to an entire house or business premise. Air conditioners usually use chemicals, which easily convert, from a gas state to a liquid form and vice versa. The chemical is basically used to transfer heat from the atmosphere inside of a room to the outside atmosphere.
An air conditioner system contains three main components. They include an evaporator, a condenser, and a compressor. The condenser and compressor are normally located on the external part of air conditioner air portion. The evaporator on the other hand is located inside the room, it can also as part of a furnace, and this is the part of air conditioner, which regulates the humidity in the house.
At the compressor, the working fluid arrives as a cool and low-pressure gas where it is squeezed by the compressor. As a result, it packs the fluid molecule closer together and the closer they become, the higher its temperature and energy. Then, the working fluid gets out of the compressor as a hot and high-pressure gas, flowing into the condenser.
When this working fluid comes out of the condenser, its temperature is relatively cooler and at this point, it has changed from a gas state to a liquid form under extreme pressure. Through a small, narrow hole, the liquid slowly flows into the evaporator.
On the other side, pressure of the liquid drops and when this occurs, it starts evaporating into a gas. During this process, heat is extracted from the surrounding as the gas evaporates after being changed from liquid state. Technically, the heat in the room air is required to separate the fluid molecules from liquid to gas.
In addition, the evaporator contains fins to help in exchanging the thermal energy with the room temperature. As soon as the working fluid comes out of the evaporator, it is relatively a cool and low pressure gas and it gets back into the compressor to repeat the entire process all over again.
A fan connected to an evaporator circulates the air inside the room to blow across the fins of an evaporator. Obviously, cold air is heavier than hot air, so in this case, the hot air in the surrounding rises to the top of the room. The air conditioner has a vent where the hot air is sucked into it. This air is used in the system to cool the gas available in the evaporator. When hot air is sucked from the air, it goes down the ducts where it is cooled and then blown into the room through ducts located at the floor level.
The entire process repeats itself severally until the desired room temperature is reached. The thermostat of the air conditioner senses that the surrounding temperature as attained the required settings and then switches off the air conditioning system. As the house warms up, the same thermostat switches the air conditioner back on to continue maintaining the desired room temperature.
Generally, air conditioning is commonly used in several different types of buildings. It can be used in the residential, commercial and furnish thermal areas. in addition, these cooling systems are also used in so many types of automobiles such as buses, cars, ships, aircraft, spacecraft, trains, just to mention a few to improve the comfort levels of individuals onboard. On the other hand, process applications are also used in originating a perfect environment for certain special techniques to be done in places such as mines, laboratories, hospital theaters, food processing units, industries, among others. Lastly, air conditioning units comes with a lot of benefits especially for your healthy.