What is Air Condition and how does it work ?

hi

An air conditioner (AC) in a room or a car works by collecting hot air from a given space, processing it to release cool air into the same space where the hot air had originally been collected. This processing is primarily done using five components:

Evaporator
Compressor
Condenser
Expansion valve
Refrigerant

An air conditioner (AC) in a room or a car works by collecting hot air from a given space, processing it within itself with the help of a refrigerant and a bunch of coils and then releasing cool air into the same space where the hot air had originally been collected. This is essentially how air conditioners work.

Imagine that you’re outside in the sweltering heat of a particularly hot summer day, running some godforsaken errands that couldn’t be put off any longer.

The heat is so unbearable that it feels like the hottest day on Earth since the dawn of civilization. However, there is one thing that keeps you going: the knowledge that you’ll be inside your air conditioned home in one hour.

I’m sure that all of you have had this experience at least once in your lives.

The ‘cooling revolution’ that air conditioners brought to human society can never be discounted.

Although previous generations had fans and other methods of keeping cool on hot days, they were never as amazingly effective as modern air conditioners in terms of sheer cooling capacity.

In this article, we’re going to talk about air conditioners and what they do – as well as how do they do it – which makes them almost a necessity in urban regions.

Air conditioner installations mainly come in two types: window systems and split systems (these are further classified into mini-split and central systems).

In everyday language, these are commonly referred to as window ACs and split ACs, respectively.

Regardless of the type of installation, all air conditioners consist of four major components that are listed below:

An evaporator is basically a heat exchanger coil that’s responsible for collecting heat from inside a room through a refrigerant gas.

This component is known as the evaporator, and is where the liquid refrigerant absorbs heat and evaporates to become gas.

Some of the most common refrigerant gases used in air conditioning systems include hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs (like, R-410A) hydrochlorofluorocarbons or HCFCs (like, R-22) and hydrocarbons (like R-290 and R-600A).

It is this gas that actually absorbs the heat from the room and travels to the the next component for further processing, which is…

As the name clearly signifies, this is where compression of the gaseous refrigerant occurs. It’s located in the outside unit, i.e., the part that’s installed outside the house.

The condenser receives the vaporized refrigerant from the compressor, converts it back to liquid and expels the heat outside. Needless to say, it’s also located on the outside unit of the split AC.

Also referred to as the throttling device, the expansion valve is located between the two sets of coils (the chilled coils of the evaporator and the hot coils of the condenser).

It keeps tabs on the amount of refrigerant moving towards the evaporator.

Note that in the case of window ACs, the three aforementioned components are all located inside a small metal box that is installed in a window opening.

These are the main components of an air conditioner. Now let’s look at how they work together to make an AC do what it does.

An air conditioner collects hot air from a given space, processes it within itself with the help of a refrigerant and a bunch of coils and then releases cool air into the same space where the hot air had originally been collected. This is essentially how all air conditioners work.

Many folks believe that an air conditioner produces chilled air with the help of machines installed inside it, allowing it to cool a room so quickly.