If you are feeling the summer heat too much then you are definitely going to turn on the magical machine which makes all the heat go away – the air conditioner. Although there are other such appliances none of them is as magical as an air conditioner to fight the scorching heat. Whether it’s your home, car or the shopping mall you are visiting, you will find air conditioners everywhere.

We all love the moment when we are sweating from the unbearable heat and then suddenly enter an air-conditioned room. It is incomparable and makes you feel better instantly.

Air Conditioner can help you to cool your room instantly and also helps you maintain a certain humidity level. It is a must-have appliance nowadays and one of the best ways to cool your room. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration is almost the same thing, one is done on a large scale and the other is a slightly smaller box but both of them got their magical power from the laws of Physical Chemistry. In this article, we are going to discuss air conditioners, what they do, and how do they do it to keep your surroundings magically chilled.

Parts of an Air Conditioner

In order to understand how the air conditioner works, it is important to know about some of its main parts and their functions. Air Conditioner usually comes in two variants the split ac and the window ac. One of them works as a single unit while the other has two units despite that they have a lot in common. Let’s talk about the 5 main parts of the air conditioner.

Evaporator

The evaporator is the most important part of the air conditioner. We can also term this as the evaporator coil and it is where heat is picked up from your room

using the refrigerant gas. When the indoor air blows over the coils the refrigerant absorb the heat from the air inside it starts to evaporate and form a vapor. This works on the principle of the 2nd law of thermodynamics which tells that the heat flows from hot to cold naturally.

Compressor

Whether it’s Air Compressor For Garage or for Air Conditioning, It’s one of most Crucial part in both. The AC compressor is located in the outside unit of the air conditioner which is installed outside of your home. As the name suggests its task is to compress the refrigerant. Here three gas law works together, the Boyle’s Law, Gay-Lussac’s Law, and Charles’s Law.

This combined gas law states that if the pressure increases then the temperature also increases so when we compress the refrigerant it will start heating up. It heats the refrigerant higher than the temperature which is outside and thus it naturally moves from hotter to colder bodies. In this way, heat is dispensed outside.

Condenser

The Condenser is also located on the outside unit of the AC, Split AC to be more precise. It releases the gaseous refrigerant from the compressor and then converts it back to the liquid and moves the heat outside. It is just the opposite of the evaporator, the moment when the evaporator contains the cold refrigerant, the condenser will be having the hot refrigerant.

Expansion Valve

The Expansion Valve is located between the two coils, evaporator coil, and the condenser coil. When the refrigerant has to leave the condenser then it has to be cooled down because it’s too hot to enter the evaporator coil. Here the Expansion valve or also known as the throttling device comes into play. You can also say that it removes the pressure from the liquid and allow the refrigerant to change from liquid to vapor or vice versa.

Refrigerant

Refrigerant is not actually a part but an important component required to produce cool air. It is also known as coolant, is a special fluid that is vital to technology related to cooling or freezing. You can call it the messenger of the Air Conditioner as it carries the heat from inside and moves outside of your building through the cooling tubes and copper coil. The refrigerant is used here because it has the ability to change its state from liquid to vapor and vice versa constantly.

How the Air Conditioner Works

Now let’s talk about Physical Chemistry which happens inside the air conditioner to keep our room cold. We all must have known by now that any liquid which evaporates into the gaseous state absorbs the heat. let’s say: the water, it has to absorb the heat to evaporate and thus the heat is carried away with it. We can take a real-life example such as sweating to stay cool. When we sweat a lot then it evaporates itself creating a cooling effect.

The best air conditioner in India uses the refrigerant which constantly changes from liquid to gas and back to liquid again to move the heat from one place: Your room to the outside which is already hot so it doesn’t matter. When you turn on the Ac the refrigerant flows from coils that are exposed to the air inside your room.

The refrigerant has a low boiling point so the heat from the inside is more than enough to turn it into a gas. Now there is more heat in the refrigerant than your home. It is done inside the evaporator coil and it also wipes out the moisture from the incoming air which helps in dehumidifying your room.

The Ac then dumps the heat which is absorbed by the refrigerant which the help of the condenser and the outside unit and then it condenses the refrigerant back to a liquid so it can be used again and again using the help of a compressor.

The same thing is done in the loop until the temperature in your room reaches the temperature you set in the act. A fan helps to blow the cold air inside your room from the same place where it was originally collected. When it comes to a Window AC all the components lie inside the same box but the process of cooling the air remains the same in both cases.