Teruya Tanaka

Environment friendly revolution in home appliances

In home appliances, electrical energy is optimally controlled by using power electronics technology, creating a comfortable environment in terms of energy saving, low sound generation, and reduced time consumption. At present, this technology has been expanding the range of its applications and leading environment friendly revolution in home appliances. This paper describes an ultra low-noise washing machine with direct drive motor, an energy saving inverter refrigerator with twin-evaporator, a high efficiency microwave oven, a high output power induction heating rice cooker, and a twin-burner induction heating range.

A new induction cooking range for heating any kind of metal vessels

The author describes the development of a novel induction cooking range for heating not only special iron vessels but also nonmagnetic and low-resistivity metal vessels such as aluminum pans, which cannot be heated by conventional induction ranges. Input resistances of exciting coils together with the various metal vessels were investigated, and the optimum characteristics of a high-frequency inverter were determined. The inverter has double-layer coils and two resonance-circuit capacitors. Proper coils and frequencies are automatically selected through the detection of the vessel material. The induction range can also prevent undesirable levitation of light aluminum vessels on the top plate by monitoring the variation of the resonance frequency. >

New IC for Sound Multiplex Decoder

Two and a half years have passed since television sound multiplex broadcasting was inaugurated in Japan in autumn, 1978. At first, the TV stations with sound multiplex programs were limited in number and operated only in Tokyo and Osaka districts. Now, more and more local TV stations are offering sound multiplex programs. As a result, the number of TV receivers with the function of receiving sound multiplex programs has also increased. To develop sound multiplex signal processing circuits with high performance at a reduced cost, more use of ICs is required.