Overview
HVAC helps keep people comfortable and healthy by maintaining good indoor air quality, humidity and comfortable temperatures. Designing for comfort requires integrated knowledge of human physiology, heat transfer, psychrometrics, and mechanical systems. Most professionals don't learn this stuff in school or on the jobsite, but are expected unrealistically to meet your physiological needs and wants for indoor environmental quality based predominantly on the skills of assembling building components. This is the #1 reason why over 50% of occupants are unsatisfied with their thermal environments.
This 6-hour course provides the basic concepts of human comfort, temperature - humidity relationships, the principles of psychrometrics and modes of heat transfer you need to design new HVAC systems and/or to retrofit existing systems. It also covers the methodology of heat loss/heat gain calculations and the concepts of noise and acoustic treatment. This course is applicable to mechanical engineers, architects, energy auditors, facility managers, operation and maintenance personal and others in the design and renovation of facilities. T he course is relevant to anyone needing to know more about HVAC fundamentals and processes. Basic knowledge of thermodynamics, fluid flow desired.
This course is a companion to the course “HVAC Equipment and Systems” on PDHengineer.com, which focuses on HVAC heating and cooling equipment, air and hydronic distribution and the various types of HVAC systems, is separately listed.
The reader must take a multiple-choice quiz consisting of thirty (30) questions at the end of this course to obtain PDH credits.
Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained
This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:
- Thermal Comfort – describes the considerations of human comfort, variable affecting thermal comfort, and related terminology such as mean radiant temperature, wind chill factor, heat index, operative temperature, effective temperature and comfort zone
- Psychrometrics - Describes how to read seven terms dry-bulb temperature, wet-bulb temperature, dew-point temperature, relative humidity, humidity ratio, specific enthalpy and specific volume on psychrometric chart. It also describes 4 air-conditioning processes viz. mixing; sensible cooling and heating; cooling with dehumidification; and humidification
- Modes of Heat Transfer – Describes heat flow through solids and air. It also includes the terminology and relationships between conductivity, conductance, resistivity, U-factors etc.
- Heat Gain and Heat Loss in Building – Includes heat loss/gain calculation procedure, basic concepts and methods to determine cooling loads, effects of windows, walls, roofs and partitions on loads, basic types of internal loads, how to find and use local climate data and effects of air infiltration and ventilation
- Annual Energy Use Calculations – Describes the concept of balance point temperature and heating and cooling degree days in determining annual energy costs
Course
Click on the following link to the PDF document to review the course material before taking the quiz for credit.
HVAC Concepts and Fundamentals
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