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Air-Conditioning Basics
An air conditioner is basically a refrigerator without the insulated box. It uses the evaporation of a refrigerant, like Freon, to provide cooling. The mechanics of the Freon evaporation cycle are the same in a refrigerator as in an air conditioner. The term Freon, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is generically "used for any of various nonflammable fluorocarbons used as refrigerants and as propellants for aerosols."
This is how the evaporation cycle in an air conditioner works.
The compressor compresses cool Freon gas, causing it to become hot, high-pressure Freon gas (red in the diagram above). This hot gas runs through a set of coils so it can dissipate its heat, and it condenses into a liquid.
The Freon liquid runs through an expansion valve, and in the process it evaporates to become cold, low-pressure Freon gas (light blue in the diagram above). This cold gas runs through a set of coils that allow the gas to absorb heat and cool down the air inside the building. Mixed in with the Freon is a small amount of a lightweight oil. This oil lubricates the compressor.
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Types of Air conditioning units
Split-system AC Units
Chilled-water and Cooling-tower AC Units |
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This is how a Heat Pump works.
A heat pump, as the name suggests, is a device that "pumps" heat from one location to another. The most popular heat pump is the air-source type (air-to-air), which operates in two basic modes:
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As an air-conditioner, a heat pump's indoor coil (heat exchanger) extracts heat from the interior of a structure and pumps it to the coil in the unit outside where it is discharged to the air outside (hence the term air-to-air heat pump) and
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As a heating device the heat pump's outdoor coil (heat exchanger) extracts heat from the air outside and pumps it indoors where it is discharged to the air inside.
The problem in comprehending such technology is that it is difficult to understand how heat extracted from,say, ten degree air (or water) can heat anything. This is where the unit's compressor and the "phase-change" physical properties of the refrigerant come into play: the compressor boosts the extracted heat to a much higher temperature gas which gives up its heat as it condenses to a liquid in the condensing coil and is distributed to the structure by the fan or blower in the air-handler. |
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