Toshiba Carrier’s world-first inverter air conditioners honoured as IEEE milestone

Toshiba Carrier’s world’s-first commercial air conditioner

Toshiba Carrier is an air-conditioning joint venture in Japan between tech giant Toshiba Corporation and Carrier. Carrier is a part of Carrier Global Corporation, a leading global provider of healthy, safe and sustainable building and cold chain solutions.

The IEEE Milestones programme commends historic achievements of groundbreaking innovations in the areas of electrical, electronics, ICT, which are at least 25 years old and have made a significant contribution to the advancement of society and industry.

Since the start of the programme in 1983, IEEE has awarded 209 milestones in the world. The first IEEE Milestone for achievement in the HVAC industry is awarded to Toshiba Carrier.

With this honour, the Toshiba group has received three IEEE Milestone; “Japanese Word Processor JW-10” in 2008 and “Laptop PC T1100 in 2013” are the previous two Milestones awarded in addition to this most recent Milestone.

Before the emergence of inverter air conditioners, the arrival of new technology was long-awaited for a mechanism to achieve reduced energy loss and more flexible temperature adjustment than the conventional on-off control of the compressor run at a fixed speed (50 or 60Hz in Japan).

Toshiba, with a state-of-the-art power electronics technologies and microprocessor control, achieved a significant downsizing in its inverters that were instrumental in variable-speed compressor operation for optimised temperature control with significantly improved comfort and energy efficiency. These innovations have led to wide-spread use of inverter air conditioners across the world.

“It is a great honour that our achievement has been recognised as an IEEE Milestone”, said Toru Kubo, president and CEO of Toshiba Carrier Corporation. “We take pride in this glorious achievement by our predecessors and would like to carry their spirit into the next generation to lead in global innovation as a heat pump solution company and offer products, systems and services that give added values for our customers’ businesses.”