Air Conditioning - Uses

Uses

Air-conditioning engineers broadly divide air-conditioning applications into what they call comfort and process applications.

Comfort applications aim to provide a building indoor environment that remains relatively constant despite changes in external weather conditions or in internal heat loads.

Air conditioning makes deep plan buildings feasible, for otherwise they would have to be built narrower or with light wells so that inner spaces received sufficient outdoor air via natural ventilation. Air conditioning also allows buildings to be taller, since wind speed increases significantly with altitude making natural ventilation impractical for very tall buildings. Comfort applications are quite different for various building types and may be categorized as:

• Low-rise residential buildings, including single family houses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings
• High-rise residential buildings, such as tall dormitories and apartment blocks
• Commercial buildings, which are built for commerce, including offices, malls, shopping centers, restaurants, etc.
• Institutional buildings, which includes government buildings, hospitals, schools, etc.
• Industrial spaces where thermal comfort of workers is desired.
• Sports stadiums: recently, stadiums have been built with air conditioning, such as the University of Phoenix Stadium and in Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

The structural impact of an air conditioning unit will depend on the type and size of the unit.

In addition to buildings, air conditioning can be used for many types of transportation, including motor-cars, buses and other land vehicles, trains, ships, aircraft, and spacecraft.

Process applications aim to provide a suitable environment for a process being carried out, regardless of internal heat and humidity loads and external weather conditions. It is the needs of the process that determine conditions, not human preference. Process applications include these:

• Hospital operating theatres, in which air is filtered to high levels to reduce infection risk and the humidity controlled to limit patient dehydration. Although temperatures are often in the comfort range, some specialist procedures, such as open heart surgery, require low temperatures (about 18 °C, 64 °F) and others, such as neonatal, relatively high temperatures (about 28 °C, 82 °F).
• Cleanrooms for the production of integrated circuits, pharmaceuticals, and the like, in which very high levels of air cleanliness and control of temperature and humidity are required for the success of the process.
• Facilities for breeding laboratory animals. Since many animals normally reproduce only in spring, holding them in rooms in which conditions mirror those of spring all year can cause them to reproduce year-round.
• Environmental control of data centers
• Textile manufacturing
• Physical testing facilities
• Plants and farm growing areas
• Nuclear power facilities
• Chemical and biological laboratories
• Mining
• Industrial environments
• Food cooking and processing areas

In both comfort and process applications, the objective may be to not only control temperature, but also humidity, air quality, and air movement from space to space.