ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,589,630, issued on March 31, was assigned to Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (Chiyoda-ku, Japan).
"Vehicle air-conditioning apparatus" was invented by Takeshi Inoue (Tokyo).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A vehicle air-conditioning apparatus includes emergency dampers switchable between opening states for opening emergency vents and closing states for closing emergency vents. A control device switches the emergency dampers from the closing states to the opening states while keeping an indoor fan operating, when determining that refrigerant is leaked from a refrigerant circuit on the basis of results of detection by refrigerant leakage detectors...