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The condenser coil of a refrigerator. In systems involving heat transfer, a condenser is a heat exchanger used to condense a gaseous substance into a liquid state through cooling. In doing so, the latent heat is released by the substance and transferred to the surrounding environment. Condensers are used for efficient heat rejection in many ...
Condensers with forced-circulation cooling usually employ water as the cooling fluid. The flow may be open, from a tap to a sink, and driven only by the water pressure in the tap. Alternatively, a closed system may be used, in which the water is drawn by a pump from a tank, possibly refrigerated, and returned to it. Water-cooled condensers are ...
An air-cooled condenser is however, significantly more expensive and cannot achieve as low a steam turbine exhaust pressure (and temperature) as a water-cooled surface condenser. Surface condensers are also used in applications and industries other than the condensing of steam turbine exhaust in power plants.
It is commonly applied to the calculation of heat transfer in heat exchangers, but can be applied equally well to other problems. For the case of a heat exchanger, U {\displaystyle U} can be used to determine the total heat transfer between the two streams in the heat exchanger by the following relationship:
The equipment used can consist of machines used to remove heat such as a chiller or a cooling tower and equipment for adding heat to the building's water such as a boiler or a commercial water heater. Hydronic fan coil units can be generally divided into two types: Two-pipe fan coil units or four-pipe fan coil units. Two-pipe fan coil units ...
The condenser is the hot side of an air conditioner or heat pump. Condensers are heat exchangers, and can transfer heat to air or to an intermediate fluid (such as water or an aqueous solution of ethylene glycol) to carry heat to a distant sink, such as ground (earth sink), a body of water, or air (as with cooling towers). constant air volume
Water is inexpensive, non-toxic, and available over most of the earth's surface.Liquid cooling offers higher thermal conductivity than air cooling. Water has unusually high specific heat capacity among commonly available liquids at room temperature and atmospheric pressure allowing efficient heat transfer over distance with low rates of mass transfer.
The condenser generally uses either circulating cooling water from a cooling tower to reject waste heat to the atmosphere, or once-through cooling (OTC) water from a river, lake or ocean. In the United States, about two-thirds of power plants use OTC systems, which often have significant adverse environmental impacts.