Another important and common application of subcooling is its indirect use on the superheating process. Superheating is analogous to subcooling in an operative way, and both processes can be coupled using an internal heat exchanger. Subcooling here serves itself from the superheating and vice versa, allowing heat to flow from the refrigerant at a higher pressure (liquid), to the one with lower pressure (gas). This creates an energetic equivalence between the subcooling and the superheating phenomena when there is no energy loss. Normally, the fluid that is being subcooled is hotter than the refrigerant that is being superheated, allowing an energy flux in the needed direction. Superheating is critical for the operation of compressors because a system lacking it may provide the compressor with a liquid gas mixture, situation that generally leads to the destruction of the gas compressor because liquid is uncompressible. This makes subcooling an easy and widespread source of heat for the superheating process.
