[757labs] air conditioner

[Nathan McGuirt]

Yeah, the key with an air conditioner is that it's effectively pumping heat 'uphill' from a lower heat area to a higher heat area. I always imagine it like a set of locks on a river. You absorb water (heat) at the low level, then have to pump it up to the high level so you can release it, rinse, repeat. The air conditioner doesn't add extra heat energy to the system, it just 'concentrates' the heat energy already present in the refrigerant gas by compressing it. In a perfect world, you would then have liquid freon leaving the condenser at the outside temperature, which will drop significantly when you let it expand through the expansion valve into the evaporator core. At that point it absorbs heat from the room, and you compress it again, to get a really really hot liquid freon that can be run through a condenser to lose some of that heat energy to the outside air.

I can't think of a way to effect the same change by directly adding heat energy to the refrigerant gas. Perhaps you could someone use evaporative cooling to your advantage.

On Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Kevin McKinley wrote:

> Probably not.
> 
> You'd end up with warm freon at only a slightly higher pressure, and
> you couldn't get enough expansion to provide good cooling.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 21:42:22 -0400
> Steve Nelson <snelson at webapper.com (mailto:snelson at webapper.com)> wrote:
> 
> > Can anyone tell me if this is a crazy idea or not?
> > 
> > Would it be possible to replace the compressor in an air conditioner
> > with a fresnel lens? Instead of heating the freon by increasing the
> > pressure, just directly heat the freon with sunlight through a
> > fresnel lens. The volume would stay the same, but the temperature
> > would increase. Then run the hot freon through an expansion valve
> > increasing the volume thus decreasing the temperature. Would that
> > work?
> > 
> > Steve
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