Keep cool

 

A mechanical engineering student from Purdue University in the US has developed a new technique to save energy and maintenance costs on air conditioning units.

Graduate student Woohyun Kim worked with Professor James Braun to produce a system that indicates when refrigerant levels are low, thereby preventing the units from working unnecessarily hard. Units that are low on refrigerant must compensate by running for longer to maintain the desired temperature.

"Not only does the energy efficiency go down, but you also reduce the lifetime of the unit because it has to work harder, causing parts to wear out faster," commented Braun. "It's also very time consuming and costly to have a technician check the refrigerant and charge it up to specification. To accurately learn how much charge is in the system, you have to remove all of the refrigerant and weigh it, a procedure that requires a vacuum pump and is quite time consuming."

The new system works via sensors along the path of the air-conditioning unit. Data from the sensors is interpreted via an algorithm to work out how much refrigerant is left in the system.

With applications stretching from the home to cars, the inventors are currently working on ways to implement the system commercially.

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