Automotive air-conditioning apparatus

Abstract

To make it possible to provide high quality heating or warming with low environmental pollution for a low environmental pollution vehicle such as an electric vehicle or a hybrid vehicle, an automotive air-conditioning apparatus has a hot water circuit that includes a hot water heater (heat source unit), a hot water circulating pump and a heater core to thereby perform a heating operation for heating passenger compartment air wherein, an electric motor is excited under the condition that the rotation thereof is fixed to thereby generate heat in the electric motor. The generated heat is utilized as a heat source for the hot water heater. The restricting mechanism may include two electric motors which are rotated in opposite directions to each other or a lock mechanism. Also, a cooling operation for cooling the passenger compartment air may be performed by driving the compressor (heat source unit) with the electric motors, a dehumidifying operation may be performed by simultaneously effecting the heating and cooling operations, or a heat pump type heating operation may be performed by having the refrigerant circuit acting reversibly.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.