Seat ventilation is a feature that is offered in many luxury cars today. The system works by using a clever combination of perforated leather seating surfaces and small fans integrated into the seats.
Some systems also incorporate a micro cooling element, much like an air conditioner. While the number of fans and the exact system design varies depending on the auto manufacturer, all of them work on the same principle. They draw in air from the cooler, lower area of the passenger compartment and transfer it uniformly to the seat cushion and back rest. These fans create air flow, at adjustable intensities, through the fine perforations in the leather. This quickly cools the surfaces of the seats to a pleasant temperature, even if the vehicle has been heated by an intense amount of sunlight for a long period of time.
A standard car seat blocks your body's built-in cooling system. Ordinarily you eject heat through your pores in the form of water vapour, which carries the heat invisibly into the air. Having a seat pressing against your back and bottom prevents this water vapour from escaping, causing it to condense into sticky sweat. It's like wearing a jacket in hot weather.
But the gently circulating air of a ventilated seat carries away your body heat and helps to keep you cooler and your clothes drier during warmer months. On some vehicles, the heated and ventilated functions can even be used simultaneously, circulating the seat heating more quickly.
This is an added benefit on cold or damp days as the dual function helps to dry off clothes or keep you warm and dry as quickly as possible. By employing thermal comfort measuring tools and subjective tests, the U. So by confining the cooled air directly to the spot where the hot driver or passenger is sitting, air-conditioned seats use energy more efficiently than the air conditioners that cool the entire interior of the car.
They don't completely eliminate fuel use and pollution, but they minimize it. Some cars even include memory settings for how you like the seats to be heated or cooled, AutoNation Drive reports. A more environmentally friendly option is to air condition the seats instead. Though ways to cool seats differ, the most common method uses several fans inside the seat to circulate air through a layer of material that diffuses the air, which then blows out through the perforated or mesh upholstery.
The air blowing out of the fans might or might not be refrigerated. A gas in a closed loop is compressed and then condensed to cool into a liquid to refrigerate the air. The liquid then goes through an expansion valve, turning back into a gas and cooling further. Modern air-conditioned seats use a single system to heat and cool. Changes in temperature occur through the foam cushion and perforated leather, in response to actuation of a switch and CPU control. Multiple fans inside the seat produce air circulation, which blows through a diffusion layer that spreads the cooling effect throughout the seat and outward through the mesh, cooling the surface.
This air may or may not be refrigerated. Even unrefrigerated air is important in keeping you cool in your car seat. A standard car seat blocks your body's built-in cooling system.
Ordinarily you eject heat through your pores in the form of water vapor, which carries the heat invisibly into the air. Having a seat pressing against your back and bottom prevents this water vapor from escaping, causing it to condense into sticky sweat. It's like wearing a jacket in hot weather. But the porous covering of an air-conditioned seat allows your body's natural cooling system to work even when sitting down and keeps you cool by circulating air across your skin.
The moving air carries your body's heat away. But some air-conditioned car seats also use a cooling element. Like most air conditioners, these work on a compression, condensation, expansion cycle. For more details, see How Air Conditioners Work. The short version is that air conditioning operates on a very simple principle: When a gas in this case referred to as a refrigerant is compressed, it becomes warmer and when it expands it becomes cooler.
This principle can be used to remove the heat from a room, a car, or even a car seat and carry it elsewhere. Until recently, the gas most commonly used as a refrigerant in air conditioning systems was Freon , the commercial name for a chlorofluorocarbon CFC manufactured by DuPont.
However, CFCs have been found to be destructive to the Earth 's atmosphere, creating holes in the ozone layer and contributing to global warming, and are now considered too dangerous for general use. So Freon has been largely replaced in automobile air conditioners by the hydrofluorocarbon HFCa. In an air conditioner, this gas is run through a device called a compressor.
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