Many of the subcomponents for this product, such as air mix door, servo motor and blower fan were newly developed, which enabled to reduce the unit’s size by 20% compared to DENSO’s conventional model, and significantly standardized the unit.

—Katsuhisa Shimokawa, executive director responsible for DENSO’s Thermal Systems Business Unit

The thickness of the air mix door is half that of DENSO’s conventional ones, by using advanced forming technologies, thus reducing the depth and weight of the unit. Also, the conventional unit required several servo motors to operate the air mix door, whereas the new unit has standardized doors and needs only one, enabling the unit case to be made smaller.

For the new blower fan, the wing blades of the fan are re-shaped to best suite the wind flow, which allowed the new fan to become 15% smaller and consume 20% less power, yet maintaining high air discharge capacity.

With these new technologies, the new smaller, lighter climate control unit with higher performance can also be used in eco-friendly cars. For instance, for stop/start system the evaporator in the unit can be replaced with a cold storage evaporator, and for hybrid and electric vehicles the heater core can be replaced with a heat pump air conditioning system. Also by changing the blower fan to two layer structure, to take in external air and circulate internal air simultaneously, the air conditioning system could be used for vehicles with limited heat sources.

DENSO’s new climate control unit is used in the new Toyota Harrier, which was released last December and in the Noah and Voxy, released this month. (Earlier post.) This new climate control unit will be offered for a wide variety of vehicle models all over the world.