Power Electronics Technology Applied in Inverter Air Conditioners

It has been 40 years since the world's first inverter air conditioner was commercialized. Over these decades, the comfort and energy efficiency of air conditioners have improved significantly and that has contributed to widespread use of inverter air conditioners around the world, driven by rapid progress of power devices as key components and power electronics technology adopting them. In this paper, following the outline of the world's first inverter air conditioning system, trends in technology to suppress current harmonics, which is one of the challenges of inverter air conditioners are discussed. In addition, the trend of high-efficiency technology using low-loss power device SJ-MOSFET and the latest energy-saving technology that combines a motor and an inverter are presented.