How do the air conditioner systems work?
Air-conditioning systems and refrigerators work in one and the same way. Instead of cooling small isolated place, as it is done with the fridge, the air-conditioning systems cool rooms, houses or entire buildings.
Aircons use chemicals or so-called refrigerants that are easily converted from liquid to gas and vice versa. The role of these chemicals is to draw the heat from the air in the room and transfer it to the atmosphere outside.
The construction of every AC system consists of three basic components:
• Indoor unit;
• Outdoor unit;
• Compressor;
The outdoor unit is equipped with a heat exchanger, fan and compressor, which is the heart of the system. The outdoor unit is installed outside. The indoor unit is equipped with a heat exchanger and is installed inside the premises. It is the indoor unit that cools, heats or dries your home.
The refrigerator agent enters the compressor as a cold low pressure gas. The compressor increases the pressure and the cold gas leaves it in the form of hot gas with high pressure as it passes into the heater exchanger of the outside unit. It very much resembles the radiator of a car. If you look on the outer side of the outdoor unit, you will notice very fine metal ribs, which allow the passing refrigerant which is now in the form of hot gas to lose its heat more rapidly.
With the release of the chemical from the external heat exchanger, its temperature is much lower, and under the influence of high pressure it changes from a gas to a liquid. The fluid enters the heat exchanger of the indoor unit through a very narrow opening. Going out of it, the pressure falls sharply and makes the liquid to evaporate, which again turns it into gas.
In this process, when the liquid evaporates and turns into gas again, it extracts the heat from the air around. This heat is needed to split the molecules of the fluid that turns from liquid into gas.
The vaporizer also has metal ribs to bring to the exchange of heat with the surrounding atmosphere.
Up to the time when the fluid has left the vaporizer, it is already cooled gas under low pressure. Then it returns to the compressor to start the whole process again.
A fan is connected to the evaporator, which helps the air to circulate around the house through the ribs. The warm air is lighter than the cold, so it is usually at the top of the room. There is a hole there where the air is sucked into the AC and goes down the pipes. The hot air is used to cool the gas into the evaporator. After the heat from the air is withdrawn, it is chilled. Then it is blown into the room through different pipes, which are usually at the floor level.
It continues again and again until the air in the room reaches the desired temperature. The thermostat senses when this temperature is reached and the aircon turns off automatically. When the room starts to get warm, the thermostat turns on the air conditioning again.
Heat Pump
How do air conditioners function in heating mode?
Imagine that you take an air conditioning and swap the external and internal body so that you put the warm body inside and the cold one outside. Then you will have a heater that works extremely well. Instead of burning fuel, what it does is to "transfer the heat."
The heat pump is an aircon that has a valve that allows you to switch from heater to air-conditioner and back.
Heat pumps can be extremely effective in regards of energy usage. There is a problem with most heat pumps and it is the accumulation of ice on the external exchanger. The heat pump must melt the ice periodically, so it must be switched automatically to AC mode so that the outdoor heat exchanger is heated. When the ice melts, the heat pump switches back on heating mode.
Types of air conditioners
The word air conditioners summarizes all the devices that can differ in the way of installing (wall, floor, ceiling and others) and in the way they function (ordinary, inverter and hyper inverter).
