How refrigerators work

Okay, I would like to write about how refrigerators work. No, really. How refrigerators work: When you compress a gas, it heats up. When you decrease the pressure, it cools down. So if you take a room-temperature gas, compress it so it gets hot, then let it cool down to room temperature, you’ll have a room temperature compressed gas. Then remove the pressure you added, and it gets proportionally colder than room temperature.

In a refrigerator, there’s a pipe with freon or some gas which runs inside and outside outside the box. Outside of the box, a compressor squeezes the gas and it gets hot, and a fan blows air over the pipe of hot compressed gas to cool it down. Now you have a room temperature (more or less) compressed gas. The room-temperature compressed gas circulates through the pipe into the fridge, where the pressure is removed. The (expanding) gas becomes cold, and another fan blows air over the cold pipe, equalizing the temperature between the inside of the fridge (by cooling it) and the pipe (by warming it). The room-temperature gas circulates out of the refrigerator, and the cycle repeats.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized by . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>