The project

Some products do all their work where no customer can see it. A scroll compressor is one of them. It sits inside a welded steel shell at the heart of a heat pump, and its spiral orbits 48 times a second. A product photo shows a black cylinder; a datasheet shows numbers. Neither explains why it works.

This film opens the shell, takes the two spirals apart and follows a single pocket of refrigerant from the edge to the centre. On the way its pressure rises from 4.8 to 13 bar and its volume shrinks from 33.5 to 13.4 cm³, live on screen. It closes on three facts a sales engineer would want a customer to remember.

It is a spec piece, not client work. The compressor is a generic, illustrative design, not any manufacturer's product. The physics is real.

Built from the documentation

The question behind this piece was whether Claude Opus 5.5 could take dense engineering documentation — equations, a patent, datasheets, refrigerant tables — and turn it into an explainer that is both correct and watchable. The film was built from these sources:

The scroll geometry equations from PDSim, Ian Bell's open-source compressor model, and his published paper on scroll geometry
Copeland patent US 6,439,867, for the part-by-part layout of a low-side hermetic compressor
Copeland and Danfoss datasheets and application guidelines, for a realistic displacement and shell size
A Carrier training document on scroll compressors
A pressure–temperature table for propane (R290), for the operating point: an air-to-water heat pump at A7/W35

From these, Claude built a geometry engine that calculates the spiral walls, the volume of every gas pocket at every degree of rotation, when each pocket closes and opens to the discharge port, and the pressure inside it. The measured values on screen — pressures, pocket volumes, the crank angle — come out of that engine rather than being typed in.

How it was checked

Before publishing, the numbers were checked twice. The pocket volumes the engine computes match PDSim's closed-form equations to within 0.01 %, and the two spiral walls never collide over a full revolution. The refrigerant pressures were recalculated independently, and a separate review pass went through every claim and every Czech term on screen.

The three facts at the end each rest on a source: scroll compressors need no suction valve; Carrier's training material counts three main moving parts; and the number of pockets compressing at once follows from the geometry itself.

For your product

The approach suits products whose value is hidden inside: pumps, valves, sensors, filters, heat exchangers, dosing systems. For a real product I would work from:

your CAD files (STEP) or dimensioned drawings
the datasheet and the operating data
an engineer on your side who signs off every number

A film like this carries its information on screen rather than in a voice-over, so it can loop silently on a trade-fair stand as well as sit on a product page, open a sales deck or support training.