Can you manage life without air conditioning?
Can you survive the frigid days and nights of winter without your heater on? Can you imagine the hot summer months without your air cooling system running all day? If you can’t, you might want to thank the person who invented the air conditioning system. It made our lives easier and more comfortable.
Air conditioning is the technique of regulating the air condition for a more comfortable environment for man or industrial products. In air conditioning, four physical properties of the air are controlled. These are air temperature, relative humidity, air movement or circulation, and dust particles in the air. Control of these four properties in air conditioning is necessary for the consideration of human comfort. Even more precise control over these properties is required in the operation of some industrial air conditioning units. Other properties like odor and air pressure are further controlled in some specific industries.
Air temperature control in air conditioning includes heating and cooling processes. Air conditioning offers many applications. Air-conditioned commercial establishments such as shops, restaurants and theaters attract customers especially during the hot and humid summer season. Modern transportation requires extensive air conditioning to provide people with much-needed comfort. Most modern buses, trains, airplanes, and passenger cars are equipped with state-of-the-art air conditioning systems that provide total comfort to the traveling public. Huge industrial plants require precise air temperature control to maintain their high level of product quality. Even industrial workers need a more supportive work environment and often rely on industrial air conditioning units to work more effectively and efficiently in their operation.
Who must have started the concept of air conditioning that we are benefiting from today? Cavemen, during prehistoric times, may have started the idea. The extreme cold inside the caves may have prompted them to devise something to make their lives more comfortable. They discovered the first fire and used it to heat their caves. Fast forwarding, the further development of room temperature control can be traced through the advancement in fireplaces, open fireplaces and ceramic stoves, but the birth of modern air conditioning is credited to Willis H. Carrier. Carrier described the energy relationships that existed in a mixture of air and water vapor. To enable engineering designers to predict component performance, Carrier proposed some simplification steps.
The development of both winter and summer air conditioning was largely credited to the Americans, and along with this came improvements to boilers, automatic controls, self-combusting furnaces, and thermal insulation.
Although research work on home refrigeration was done in the 1930s, it was not until the late 1940s that the demand for home refrigeration systems increased. The Great Depression caused a delay in public acceptance of the home cooling system due to the added expense burden that the new system brought with it. Many houses were already equipped with air conditioning in the 1950s and 1960s.
Clearly, the development of the air conditioning system has brought much comfort to daily life and favorable environments for our ever-growing industries.