Why does air compressed to a high pressure create heat?
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The simplest answer is to think of taking all of the heat in a room full of air, and squeezing that heat into a small volume. That small volume will get very hot because it has all the heat from an entire room concentrated into a small volume.
If you let that small volume of highly compressed air cool off to room temperature, then expand it back to fill the room, it will get very cold. This is because the heat in a small volume has been spread out to a large volume and there isn’t much to go around.
This is really how a refrigerator works. The fluid captures the heat in the fridge and expands. It’s then compressed, concentrating that heat. That heat is dissipated through a radiator. When it’s cooled off, that fluid is expanded again, capturing the heat of the fridge and the cycle continues.
The trick is that after you concentrate the heat (by compressing the gas), you must dissipate the heat, then when it expands, it will be quite cold.
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