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Air
Conditioning Definitions
Benefits
of the CFC Phase-out
Case
Studies of Successful CFC Elimination
Decibel Comparisons
Faq Ozone
Depletions
How
Air Conditioning Works
Ozone
Science Phase Outs
Understanding
Air Conditioning
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An air conditioner is basically a refrigerator without the insulated
box. An air conditioner is doing exactly the same thing
as your fridge, except it dumps the heat it takes out of the controlled
area and dumps it outdoors instead of in your kitchen. To understand
what goes on in the system, let's start where the "freon"
gas enters the compressor located typically in the outside part
of the unit.
As the Refrigerant gas enters the compressor, it squeezes this
freon gas that has just absorbed heat from the indoor air, causing
it to become extremely hot. This is just like what happens near
the end of a bicycle pump when you push the handle down. The air
being compressed into the end of the pump will get hot, because
all the heat that the air inside it contained, is squeezed into
an area that is many times smaller than where it just was. This
now high-pressure freon gas, that is now many times hotter than
it was before it got squeezed, runs through a set of coils outside
where a fan blows on it to cool the high temperature gas, so that
a large portion of this concentrated heat is removed from it.
The fan and coil arrangement outside are very similar to a radiator
on a car.
As the Outside unit (or radiator) cools this hot vapor, it condenses
into a liquid just like steam condenses into water when it loses
its heat. This high pressure freon liquid which has now had a
lot of its original heat forced out of it, is then pulled back
into the house where it waits its turn to pass through a tiny
opening that is the entrance to the indoor coil that sits within
your home's air stream.
By using this tiny opening to "back-up" the pressure
on the outdoor part of the system, it allows the compressor to
maintain a low pressure side within the indoor coil that is in
your home's air stream. When the cooled High pressure gas
finally passes into this low pressure area, the difference in
pressure causes part of it to immediately expand into a gas. In
a sense, this is like the compressor working in reverse, because
now the cool freon is occupying a bigger area, so the heat that
was left in it now has to spread itself out over its bigger size.
This need to use its limited heat over a now bigger gas molecule,
causes it to rapidly become quite cold, so that as it passes through
the indoor coil, the air passing over this coil (the radiator
effect again) is cooled and then spread through your home by your
home's duct work. Meanwhile the heat that was taken out of your
home's air, has entered the warming freon gas so that when it
gets back to the compressor the whole process is repeated.
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