The Story Behind: Heating technology

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Mastering climate control

As global warming contributes to extreme weather patterns worldwide, the impetus to control our immediate climatic conditions at home and at work is more pressing than ever. Joseph Le Mer has tackled head on the challenge to develop a heating system both environment friendly and budget-conscious. The French inventor began tinkering with different models for heat exchangers more than 40 years ago, and in 1993 he finally hit on the model which would catapult him and his patents to the forefront of the heating sector.

The desire to control our climates is far from new. Since the beginnings of recorded history, humans have been attempting to master an element that cannot be seen, heard, touched or smelled, but only felt - heat.  

The ancient Romans, for example, played around with idea of central heating as early as 100 BC, constructing an elaborate system of air-ducts they called hypocausts deep in the walls of public bathhouses and private residences. The hypocaust, which means "heat from below," worked by allowing smoke from a furnace to pass through the hollow spaces of walls, heating the interior as the smoky flues trailed out through the roof.

By the 12^th century, Muslim inventors in the Mediterranean region had replaced this rudimentary heating system with a new and improved one that let heat from a furnace travel across an entire house through an underground piping system.

Early modern pioneers

But it is with the advent of modern European science in the 18^th century that insights into the properties of heat - and how best to control it - took off. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, chemist Antoine Lavoisier published a scientific treatise that would plant the seeds for modern experimenting in the thermal field. Lavoisier postulated that heat (or, in his scientific jargon, "calorific fluid") flows from hot to cold bodies when these bodies are in contact with each other.

Just ten short years later, however, an Englishman man by the name of Benjamin Thompson Rumford would accidentally discover that Lavoisier's theory didn't quite account for the whole picture of how heat works. While supervising the boring of cannons as minister of war for the German state of Bavaria, Rumford was impressed by the massive - and continual - amount of heat generated during this process.

Whereas Lavoisier's calorific theory would have it that heat is flowing into the cannon from the outside - an outside which then must get colder the more heat flows - Rumford observed that, to the contrary, the cannon's surroundings were getting hotter.

More importantly, as long as the boring machine was on, the flow of heat continued. Rumford concluded that the mechanical work being exerted on the cannon by the machine was itself creating the heat.

Although undoubtedly correct, Rumford's insights into this thermal dynamic did not gain widespread acceptance until the mid-19^th century, when English physicist James Prescott Joule conducted a number of painstaking experiments confirming that work could indeed be converted into heat. Joule's results gave us the modern day unit of measuring energy - the joule.

Real-world applications

Far from being confined to an academic ivory-tower removed from on-the-ground realities or real-life applications, these early experiments in heating properties were spurred by the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Industrialisation and mechanisation demanded new and more efficient methods for creating, containing and transferring heat.

Today, practical needs continue to drive innovations in the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) sector. The heat exchanger is the hidden workhorse of this field, ensuring that whenever there is a temperature difference heat can be transferred efficiently from one medium to another. This process is central to the functioning of any climate control system, from central heating to domestic refrigerators to hot-water heaters.

Greener and cheaper heating technology

As new climate-control problems emerge and old ones linger, new types of heat exchangers are being developed to keep up with changing trends. An important figure in this sector, Le Mer has been continuously researching, developing and fine-tuning an impressive range of heat exchangers since the 1960s.

The French inventor's range of heat exchangers is notable for the single-tube design. Other exchangers that work through two or even three tubes suffer from high fabrication costs, difficulty in maintaining a good heat transfer rate and a heavy weight.

By contrast, Le Mer's heat exchangers are not only cheap to manufacture and relatively light-weight, but also more dynamic as the tube can be connected to others either end-to-end or side-by-side to meet different heating needs.

In addition to a cheap manufacturing cost, Le Mer's patents also do not exact a heavy toll on the environment. Indeed, the energy-efficiency of condensed-heat boilers, in contrast to conventional boilers that discharge piping-hot waste gases into the environment, comes from their heat exchanger.

Instead of wastefully emitting energy into the atmosphere, condensed-heat boilers utilising heat exchangers recycle the water vapour created by the burning fuel to warm up the cool water going back to the boiler. Indeed, Le Mer's range of heat exchangers for boilers can trim energy expended by more than 30 percent, making them particularly popular among green-conscious manufacturers and budget-conscious consumers.

Le Mer's company Giannoni currently supplies 80 percent of European manufacturers of condensed-heat boilers with the crucial heat exchangers that make their products possible.

The increased emphasis on environmentally-friendly products and policies over the last few decades in both the private and public sector has driven HVAC players to make their systems more green. 

Read more about the inventor: Joseph Le Mer (FR)