The market for room air conditioners in Japan has reached maturity, and there has been increasing interest in their design, as well as their fundamental function, that is, heating and cooling efficiencies, which have been regarded as the most important. Because of this concern, it is important to make an air conditioner that will harmonize with a room’s interior design and one that will be unobtrusive. Therefore, there is a great need for a thinner room air conditioner with a flat front panel, which inevitably incorporates a crossflow fan.

This paper describes an air-flow mechanism for the cross-flow fan in a limited structure like a room air conditioner, which was developed by an analytical method using the Pitot tube. As a result, a depth as thin as 99 mm (3.9 in) was attained for the inside unit of split-type room air conditioner of 2.6 kW cooling capacity.

Units: Dual