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Convection (or convective heat transfer) is the transfer of heat from one place to another due to the movement of fluid. Although often discussed as a distinct method of heat transfer, convective heat transfer involves the combined processes of conduction (heat diffusion) and advection (heat transfer by bulk fluid flow ).
This mechanism is found very commonly in everyday life, including central heating and air conditioning and in many other machines. Forced convection is often encountered by engineers designing or analyzing heat exchangers, pipe flow, and flow over a plate at a different temperature than the stream (the case of a shuttle wing during re-entry, for example).
Heat exchangers are widely used in refrigeration, air conditioning, space heating, power generation, and chemical processing. One common example of a heat exchanger is a car's radiator, in which the hot coolant fluid is cooled by the flow of air over the radiator's surface. [34] [35]
Atmospheric thermodynamics is the study of heat-to-work transformations (and their reverse) that take place in the Earth's atmosphere and manifest as weather or climate. . Atmospheric thermodynamics use the laws of classical thermodynamics, to describe and explain such phenomena as the properties of moist air, the formation of clouds, atmospheric convection, boundary layer meteorology, and ...
Variable salinity in water and variable water content in air masses are frequent causes of convection in the oceans and atmosphere which do not involve heat, or else involve additional compositional density factors other than the density changes from thermal expansion (see thermohaline circulation). Similarly, variable composition within the ...
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).
For example, a refrigerator uses a condenser to get rid of heat extracted from the interior of the unit to the outside air. Condensers are used in air conditioning, industrial chemical processes such as distillation, steam power plants, and other heat-exchange systems. The use of cooling water or surrounding air as the coolant is common in many ...
A representative pressure–volume diagram for a refrigeration cycle. Vapour-compression refrigeration or vapor-compression refrigeration system (VCRS), [1] in which the refrigerant undergoes phase changes, is one of the many refrigeration cycles and is the most widely used method for air conditioning of buildings and automobiles.