Introduction to Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Systems: Theory and Applications

by Allan Kirkpatrick

This text provides background information, description, and analysis of four major cooling system
technologies—vapor compression cooling, evaporative cooling, absorption cooling, and gas
cooling. Vapor compression systems are currently the primary technology used in most standard
domestic, commercial, and industrial cooling applications, as they have both performance and
economic advantages over the other competing cooling systems. However, there are many other
applications in which evaporative cooling, absorption cooling, or gas cooling technologies are a
preferred choice.
The main focus of the text is on the application of the thermal sciences to refrigeration
and air conditioning systems. The goals are to familiarize the reader with cooling technology
nomenclature, and provide insight into how refrigeration and air conditioning systems can be
modeled and analyzed. Cooling systems are inherently complex, as the second law of thermodynamics
does not allow thermal energy to be transferred directly from a lower temperature to
a higher temperature, so the heat transfer is done indirectly through a thermodynamic cycle.
Emphasis is placed on constructing idealized thermodynamic cycles to represent actual
physical situations in cooling systems. The text also contains numerous practical examples to
show how one can calculate the performance of cooling system components. By becoming familiar
with the analyses presented in the examples, one can gain a feel for the the representative
values of the various thermal and mechanical parameters that characterize cooling systems