One can forgive the thought that the automotive luxury of air conditioning and climate control are one and the same thing. In fact, a car equipped with climate control as an option will always be more expensive than its A / C counterpart - so why is that so?
Air conditioning system
The air conditioner produces cold air in several stages.
- The refrigerant in gaseous form is compressed by the air conditioning compressor, which drains from the belt and enters the high pressure circuit.
- This refrigerant then enters the condenser — a heat exchanger typically placed in front of the radiator — where it changes state into a liquid.
- After that it is transferred to the dryer, where most of the moisture is removed from the liquid.
- Then the liquid is pumped through a tube with an opening, which transfers the refrigerant from high pressure to low, changing its state to cold gas.
- Cold refrigerant in its gaseous state passes through the evaporator. The evaporator works as a cross-flow heat exchanger, cooling air that passes through the fins of the heat exchanger with an air conditioner fan and finally is blown and enters the car cab.
One of the disadvantages of air conditioners is that the temperature of the air entering the cabin is completely dependent on the temperature outside. The evaporator can only produce a certain heat transfer rate. This means that the air conditioning system infinitely receives input data, applies a process (for example, heating or cooling), and then produces an output signal from this process. Changes to the open-loop system must be done manually, for example, adjust the knobs on the dashboard in the red or blue areas to find the desired balance.
Climate Control System
Climate control takes over air conditioning and eliminates the game of speculation about temperature changes. As the name implies, it allows you to accurately determine the temperature of the air entering the cabin, even with a change of half a degree.
This is achieved using feedback or a feedback control system: the output of the system is converted into some form of information and sent back as feedback to the input controller so that settings can be made. Therefore, if you set the climate control to 17 degrees, it will form a feedback loop to maintain the temperature.
If the feedback loop detects that the ambient temperature is heating up, the input control will increase the fan speed, which will increase the cooling rate of the air in the passenger compartment. The effect that the evaporator of the air conditioner has on the refrigerant can be controlled by increasing or decreasing it, which allows precise control of the air temperature.
More advanced systems use dashboard sunlight detectors to determine the amount of heat that will enter the car. If a large amount of sunlight is detected, the controller will increase A / C during preparation, reducing any form of delay in the heat transfer process.
What's better?
Climate control is convenient in that, regardless of the weather, the same temperature will be maintained in the cabin, which will need to be set only once, leaving the on-board computer to do the work. While with air conditioning you will have to adjust the cooling settings not only throughout the warm season, but even one day. Most cars come with air conditioning as standard, and climate control is an optional extra or standard on more expensive models.
So the next time you go looking for your last pride and joy, think: should you stick to the good old standard air conditioning or pay for a comfortable climate control?
