How Air Conditioners Work
Learn about condensers, evaporators and compressors
All you really want to know is that there is a cold coil on the inside portion of your air conditioner unit. Air is blown over the cold coil to cool the inside of your house.
Now for the details:
Air conditioners use energy to transfer heat from the interior of your home to the outside, making the interior of your home cooler and more comfortable to live in. There are three major components to air conditioners:
- Evaporator – The evaporator is the cold indoor coil used to cool the air in your home.
- Condenser – The condenser is a hot outdoor coil which releases the collected heat outside.
- Compressor – The compressor is a pump which is used to move a heat transfer fluid (or refrigerant) between the evaporator and condenser.
Image courtesy of the US Department of Energy
The coil circulates the chemical coolant from the outside to the inside (then back to the outside, and so on), where its action simply removes heat from the air inside the building.
The chemical inside the coil is a low-pressure cool gas which becomes pressurized by the compressor and is made significantly hotter. The gas is now high-pressure hot gas which circulates through the coil on the outside portion of the AC unit. This is the back of the unit that you commonly see – with its distinct aluminum grating. In this part, the heated gas is cooled, helped along by a fan that blows air over the coil.
As the gas cools and shrinks again, it undergoes a chemical reaction that causes it to become excessively cold. By this time, it circulates back into the evaporator, on the inside portion of the unit, where it takes the warmth out of the indoor air and circulates back into the condenser where the process begins all over.
This is the process used in most forms of air conditioning. It is important to remember that each air conditioner has its own functioning methods and the outline above is a generalization of how the majority of air conditioners work.
| Write A Comment |
