Human Comfort and
Air Conditioning
Air conditioning
• modern air conditioning systems can heat, cool, humidify, dehumidify,
clean, and even deodorize the air—in other words, condition the air to
peoples’ desires
• The comfort of the human body depends primarily on three factors: the
(dry-bulb) temperature, relative humidity, and air motion
• Most people feel comfortable when the environment temperature is
between 22 and 27°C
• Most people prefer a relative humidity of 40 to 60 percent
• Most people feel comfortable at an airspeed of about 15 m/min
• For example, an environment at 10°C with 48 km/h winds feels as cold as
an environment at –7°C (20°F) with 3 km/h winds as a result of the body-
chilling effect of the air motion (the wind-chill factor)
Air conditioning Processes
• simple heating (raising the temperature)
• simple cooling (lowering the temperature)
• humidifying (adding moisture)
• dehumidifying (removing moisture)
• Sometimes two or more of these processes are needed to bring the air to
a desired temperature and humidity level
Can you draw that in the psychrometric chart?
Simple heating and cooling
• The air in these systems is heated by
circulating it through a duct that
contains the tubing for the hot gases
or the electric resistance wires
• The amount of moisture in the air
remains constant
during this process since no
moisture is added to or removed
from the air. That is, the specific
humidity of the air remains constant
(ω = constant)
• The relative humidity of air
decreases during a heating
processeven if the specific
humidity ω remains constant.
• Therefore, the relative humidity
of heated air may be well below
comfortable levels, causing dry
skin, respiratory difficulties, and
an increase in static electricity
• A cooling process at constant
specific humidity: the dry-bulb
temperature decreases and the
relative humidity increases
Heating with Humidification
• Problems associated with the low relative humidity resulting from simple
heating can be eliminated by humidifying the heated air
• This is accomplished by passing the air first through a heating section
(process 1-2) and then through a humidifying section (process 2-3)
• If steam is introduced in the humidification section,
this will result in humidification with additional
heating (T3 > T2).
• If humidification is accomplished by spraying water
into the airstream instead, part of the latent heat of
vaporization comes from the air, which results in the
cooling of the heated airstream (T3 < T2). Air should
be heated to a higher temperature in the heating
section in this case to make up for the cooling effect
during the humidification process
Cooling with Dehumidification
• The specific humidity of air remains constant during a simple cooling
process, but its relative humidity increases. If the relative humidity
reaches undesirably high levels, it may be necessary to remove some
moisture from the air, that is, to dehumidify it.
• This requires cooling the air below its dew-point temperature.
Why do we feel discomfort just before a rain
and then feel comfortable once it rains?
• Hot, moist air enters the cooling section at state 1. As it passes through the cooling coils,
its temperature decreases and its relative humidity increases at constant specific
humidity.
• If the cooling section is sufficiently long, air
reaches its dew point. Further cooling of air results in the condensation of part of the
moisture in the air.
• Air remains saturated during the entire condensation process, which follows a line of
100 percent relative humidity until the final state (state 2) is reached.
• The water vapor that condenses out of the air during this process is removed from the
cooling section through a separate channel.
• The cool, saturated air at state 2 is usually routed
directly to the room, where it mixes with the room air.
• In some cases, the air at state 2 may be at the right
specific humidity but at a very low temperature. In such
cases, air is passed through a heating section where its
temperature is raised to a more comfortable level
before it is routed to the room.
Evaporative cooling
• Conventional cooling systems operate on a refrigeration cycle, and they can
be used in any part of the world. But they have a high initial and operating
cost. In desert (hot and dry) climates, we can avoid the high cost of cooling
by using evaporative coolers, also known as swamp coolers.
• Evaporative cooling is based on a simple principle: As water
evaporates, the latent heat of vaporization is absorbed from the
water body and the surrounding air. As a result, both the water and
the air are cooled during the process
Adiabatic mixing of air streams
• Many air-conditioning applications require the mixing of two
airstreams. This is particularly true for large buildings, most
production and process plants, and hospitals, which require that the
conditioned air be mixed with a certain fraction of fresh outside air
before it is routed into the living space
• The heat transfer with the surroundings is usually small, and thus the
mixing processes can be assumed to be adiabatic
when two airstreams
at two different
states (states 1 and
2) are mixed
adiabatically, the
state of the mixture
(state 3) lies on the
straight line
connecting states 1
and 2 on the
psychrometric chart,
and the ratio of the
distances 2-3 and 3-1