Global automotive supplier DENSO has developed a new automotive climate control unit that can be used for a wide variety of vehicles ranging from compact to luxury cars. Conventional climate control units are often designed and tailored to each vehicle model, but this product has a new structure, which DENSO says enabled the company to standardize components while realizing required performance. DENSO says this new standardized automotive climate control unit, which is smaller and lighter while realizing higher performance, is the world’s first of its kind.

"Many of the subcomponents for this product, such as air mix door, servo motor and blower fan were newly developed, which enabled us to reduce the unit’s size by 20 percent compared to DENSO’s conventional model, and significantly standardized the unit," said 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, the company noted, by using sophisticated 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 suit the wind flow, which allowed the new fan to become 15 percent smaller and consume 20 percent less power, yet maintaining high air discharge capacity, according to the company.

With these new technologies, the new smaller, lighter climate control unit also can be used in eco-friendly cars, DENSO says. 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 was released last December and will be offered for a wide variety of vehicle models all over the world.