Air Conditioned

Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling the humidity of internal air. Air conditioning can be achieved using a mechanical 'air conditioner' or alternatively a variety of other methods, including passive cooling or ventilative cooling. Air conditioning is a member of a family of systems and techniques that provide heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). Heat pumps are similar in many ways to air conditioners, but use a reversing valve to allow them to both heat and also cool an enclosed space.

Air conditioners, which typically use vapor-compression refrigeration, range in size from small units used within vehicles or single rooms to massive units that can cool large buildings. Air source heat pumps, which can be used for heating as well as cooling, are becoming increasingly common in cooler climates.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), as of 2018, 1.6 billion air conditioning units were installed, which accounted for an estimated 20% of electricity usage in buildings globally with the number expected to grow to 5.6 billion by 2050. The United Nations called for the technology to be made more sustainable to mitigate climate change and for the use of alternatives, like passive cooling, evaporative cooling, selective shading, windcatchers, and better thermal insulation. CFC and HCFC refrigerants such as R-12 and R-22, respectively, used within air conditioners have caused damage to the ozone layer, and HFC refrigerants such as R-410a and R-404a, which were designed to replace CFCs and HCFCs, are instead exacerbating climate change. Both issues happen due to the venting of refrigerant to the atmosphere, such as during repairs. HFO refrigerants, used in some if not most new equipment, solve both issues with an ozone damage potential (ODP) of zero and a much lower global warming potential (GWP) in the single or double digits vs. the three or four digits of HFCs.

History

Air conditioning dates back to prehistory. Ancient Egyptian buildings used a wide variety of passive air-conditioning techniques. These became widespread from the Iberian Peninsula through North Africa, the Middle East, and Northern India.

Passive techniques remained widespread until the 20th century, when they fell out of fashion, replaced by powered A/C. Using information from engineering studies of traditional buildings, passive techniques are being revived and modified for 21st-century architectural designs.

Air conditioners allow the building's indoor environment to remain relatively constant largely independent of changes in external weather conditions and internal heat loads. They also allow deep plan buildings to be created and have allowed people to live comfortably in hotter parts of the world.

Development

Preceding discoveries

In 1558, Giambattista della Porta described a method of chilling ice to temperatures far below its freezing point by mixing it with potassium nitrate (then called "nitre") in his popular science book '' Natural Magic''. In 1620, Cornelis Drebbel demonstrated "Turning Summer into Winter" for James I of England, chilling part of the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey with an apparatus of troughs and vats. Drebbel's contemporary Francis Bacon, like della Porta a believer in science communication, may not have been present at the demonstration, but in a book published later the same year, he described it as "experiment of artificial freezing" and said that "Nitre (or rather its spirit) is very cold, and hence nitre or salt when added to snow or ice intensifies the cold of the latter, the nitre by adding to its own cold, but the salt by supplying activity to the cold of the snow."

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley, a chemistry professor at University of Cambridge, conducted an experiment to explore the principle of evaporation as a means to rapidly cool an object. Franklin and Hadley confirmed that the evaporation of highly volatile liquids (such as alcohol and ether) could be used to drive down the temperature of an object past the freezing point of water. They conducted their experiment with the bulb of a mercury-in-glass thermometer as their object and with a bellows used to speed up the evaporation. They lowered the temperature of the thermometer bulb down to while the ambient temperature was . Franklin noted that soon after they passed the freezing point of water , a thin film of ice formed on the surface of the thermometer's bulb and that the ice mass was about thick when they stopped the experiment upon reaching . Franklin concluded: "From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day."

The 19th century included a number of developments in compression technology. In 1820, English scientist and inventor Michael Faraday discovered that compressing and liquefying ammonia could chill air when the liquefied ammonia was allowed to evaporate. In 1842, Florida physician John Gorrie used compressor technology to create ice, which he used to cool air for his patients in his hospital in Apalachicola, Florida. He hoped to eventually use his ice-making machine to regulate the temperature of buildings and envisioned centralized air conditioning that could cool entire cities. Gorrie was granted a patent in 1851, but following the death of his main backer he was not able to realise his invention. In 1851, James Harrison created the first mechanical ice-making machine in Geelong, Australia, and was granted a patent for an ether vapor-compression refrigeration system in 1855 that produced three tons of ice per day. In 1860, Harrison established a second ice company and later entered the debate over how to compete against the American advantage of ice-refrigerated beef sales to the United Kingdom.

First A/C devices

Electricity made development of effective units possible. In 1901, American inventor Willis H. Carrier built what is considered the first modern electrical air conditioning unit. In 1902, he installed his first air-conditioning system, in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York; his invention controlled both the temperature and humidity which helped maintain consistent paper dimensions and ink alignment at the printing plant. Later, together with six other employees, Carrier formed The Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America, a business that in 2020 employed 53,000 people and was valued at $18.6 billion.

In 1906, Stuart W. Cramer of Charlotte, North Carolina was exploring ways to add moisture to the air in his textile mill. Cramer coined the term "air conditioning", using it in a patent claim he filed that year as analogous to "water conditioning", then a well-known process for making textiles easier to process. He combined moisture with ventilation to "condition" and change the air in the factories, controlling the humidity so necessary in textile plants. Willis Carrier adopted the term and incorporated it into the name of his company.

Domestic air conditioning soon took off. In 1914, the first domestic air conditioning was installed in Minneapolis in the home of Charles Gilbert Gates. It is however possible that the huge device (c. 7 x 6 x 20 ft) was never used, as the house remained uninhabited (Gates had already died in October 1913).

In 1931, H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman developed what would become the most common type of individual room air conditioner: one designed to sit on a window ledge. The units went on sale in 1932 at a considerable price (the equivalent of $120,000 to $600,000 in 2015 dollars.) A year later the first air conditioning systems for cars were offered for sale. Chrysler Motors introduced the first practical semi-portable air conditioning unit in 1935, and Packard became the first automobile manufacturer to offer an air conditioning unit in its cars in 1939.

Further development

Innovations in the latter half of the 20th century allowed for much more ubiquitous air conditioner use. In 1945, Robert Sherman of Lynn, Massachusetts invented a portable, in-window air conditioner that cooled, heated, humidified, dehumidified, and filtered the air.

As international development has increased wealth across countries, global use of air conditioners has increased. By 2018, an estimated 1.6 billion air conditioning units were installed worldwide, with the International Energy Agency expecting this number to grow to 5.6 billion units by 2050. Between 1995 and 2004, the proportion of urban households in China with air conditioners increased from 8% to 70%. As of 2015, nearly 100 million homes, or about 87% of US households, had air conditioning systems. In 2019, it was estimated that 90% of new single-family homes constructed in the USA included air conditioning (ranging from 99% in the South to 62% in the West).

Types of air conditioner

Mini-split and multi-split systems

Ductless systems (often mini-split, though there are now ducted mini-split) typically supply conditioned and heated air to a single or a few rooms of a building, without ducts and in a decentralized manner. Multi-zone or multi-split systems are a common application of ductless systems and allow up to eight rooms (zones or locations) to be conditioned independently from each other, each with its own indoor unit and simultaneously from a single outdoor unit. The main problem with multi-split systems is the length of the refrigerant lines for connecting the external unit to the internal ones. Though the same challenge exists for central ACs.

The first mini-split systems were sold in 1954–1968 by Mitsubishi Electric and Toshiba in Japan, where its development was motivated by the small size of homes. Multi-zone ductless systems were invented by Daikin in 1973, and variable refrigerant flow systems (which can be thought of as larger multi-split systems) were also invented by Daikin in 1982. Both were first sold in Japan. Variable refrigerant flow systems when compared with central plant cooling from an air handler, eliminate the need for large cool air ducts, air handlers, and chillers; instead cool refrigerant is transported through much smaller pipes to the indoor units in the spaces to be conditioned, thus allowing for less space above dropped ceilings and a lower structural impact, while also allowing for more individual and independent temperature control of spaces, and the outdoor and indoor units can be spread across the building. Variable refrigerant flow indoor units can also be turned off individually in unused spaces. The lower start-up power of VRF's DC inverter compressors and their inherent DC power requirements also allow VRF solar-powered heat pumps to be run using DC-providing solar panels.

Ducted central systems

Split-system central air conditioners consist of two heat exchangers, an outside unit (the condenser) from which heat is rejected to the environment and an internal heat exchanger (the fan coil unit (FCU), air handling unit, or evaporator) with the piped refrigerant being circulated between the two. The FCU is then connected to the spaces to be cooled by ventilation ducts.

Central plant cooling

Large central cooling plants may use intermediate coolant such as chilled water pumped into air handlers or fan coil units near or in the spaces to be cooled which then duct or deliver cold air into the spaces to be conditioned, rather than ducting cold air directly to these spaces from the plant, which is not done due to the low density and heat capacity of air which would require impractically large ducts. The chilled water is cooled by chillers in the plant, which uses a refrigeration cycle to cool water, often transferring its heat to the atmosphere even in liquid-cooled chillers through the use of cooling towers. Chillers may be air or liquid-cooled.

Portable units

A portable system has an indoor unit on wheels connected to an outdoor unit via flexible pipes, similar to a permanently fixed installed unit (such as a ductless split air conditioner).

Hose systems, which can be ''monoblock'' or ''air-to-air'', are vented to the outside via air ducts. The ''monoblock'' type collects the water in a bucket or tray and stops when full. The ''air-to-air'' type re-evaporates the water and discharges it through the ducted hose and can run continuously. Such portable units draw indoor air and expel it outdoors through a single duct, which negatively impacts their overall cooling efficiency.

Many portable air conditioners come with heat as well as dehumidification function.

Window unit and packaged terminal

The packaged terminal air conditioner (PTAC), through-the-wall, and window air conditioners are similar. PTAC systems may be adapted to provide heating in cold weather, either directly by using an electric strip, gas, or other heaters, or by reversing the refrigerant flow to heat the interior and draw heat from the exterior air, converting the air conditioner into a heat pump. They may be installed in a wall opening with the help of a special sleeve on the wall and a custom grill that is flush with the wall and window air conditioners can also be installed in a window, but without a custom grill.

Packaged air conditioner

Packaged air conditioners (also known as self-contained units) are central systems that integrate into a single housing all the components of a split central system, and deliver air, possibly through ducts, to the spaces to be cooled. Depending on their construction they may be outdoors or indoors, on roofs ( rooftop units), draw the air to be conditioned from inside or outside a building and be water, refrigerant or air-cooled. Often, outdoor units are air-cooled while indoor units are liquid-cooled using a cooling tower.

Operation

Operating principles

Cooling in traditional AC systems is accomplished using the vapor-compression cycle, which uses the forced circulation and phase change of a refrigerant between gas and liquid to transfer heat. The vapor-compression cycle can occur within a unitary, or packaged piece of equipment; or within a chiller that is connected to terminal cooling equipment (such as a fan coil unit in an air handler) on its evaporator side and heat rejection equipment such as a cooling tower on its condenser side. An air source heat pump shares many components with an air conditioning system, but includes a reversing valve which allows the unit to be used to heat as well as cool a space.

Air conditioning equipment will reduce the absolute humidity of the air processed by the system if the surface of the evaporator coil is significantly cooler than the dew point of the surrounding air. An air conditioner designed for an occupied space will typically achieve a 30% to 60% relative humidity in the occupied space.

Most modern air-conditioning systems feature a dehumidification cycle during which the compressor runs while the fan is slowed to reduce the evaporator temperature and therefore condense more water. A dehumidifier uses the same refrigeration cycle but incorporates both the evaporator and the condenser into the same air path; the