Air Conditioner Manufacturing: From Carrier to ABB Robots

Air conditioner manufacturing starts with a sealed loop of copper tube, a compressor and two coils made of hundreds of thin metal fins, and every one of those parts has to be handled, joined and tested. This post follows the machine from Willis Carrier's 1902 system for a Brooklyn printing plant to the window units and split systems built today. It then looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 1600, the IRB 660 palletizer, YuMi and GoFa already work on appliance lines, and where they could do more.

A window air conditioner set in a window frame, the product of the 1930s design. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From a printing plant to the window unit

In 1902 Willis Carrier designed what is widely regarded as the first modern electrical air conditioning system, for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn. Its job was to control temperature and humidity so that paper and ink stayed aligned during color printing. Carrier worked for the Buffalo Forge Company then. In 1907 Buffalo Forge set up the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America, and in 1915 Carrier and six colleagues founded the Carrier Engineering Corporation. In 1906 Carrier had already sold a spray-type apparatus to Chronicle Cotton Mills in Belmont, North Carolina, an early humidifying system for an industrial plant.

Willis Carrier in 1915, whose 1902 cooling system for a Brooklyn printing plant started modern air conditioning. Photo: Carrier Corporation via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Cooling for ordinary rooms came later. H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman developed a window-ledge room air conditioner in 1931 and 1932, and it went on sale in 1932. By 1947 Henry Galson's more compact and cheaper in-window unit had sold more than 43,000 copies. Chrysler introduced the first practical semi-portable unit in 1935, and in 1954 the Austin Air-Conditioned Village in Texas put air conditioning in each of 22 homes. Inside, a window unit has the same parts as a large system: a compressor, two finned coils and copper tube joined by brazed joints, all sealed around the refrigerant.

The finned coil of a Frigidaire window air conditioner, seen from outside. Photo: kristinafh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Smaller homes in Japan pushed the next design. Toshiba sold the first mini-split system in Japan in 1961, and Mitsubishi Electric sold the first wall-mounted one in 1968, the first air conditioner with a cross-flow fan. The first mini-split sold in the US came in 1969, and Daikin introduced multi-zone ductless systems in 1973. The split design put the compressor outside and the coil inside, so a factory now built two units and a pair of connecting lines for each sale.

Brazing kit: torch, filler rods, flux, goggles and a mask, the tools of hand brazing. Photo: Phil Gradwell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What happens on a line today, and where ABB fits

A heat exchanger coil is built by bending straight copper tube into hairpins, threading them through holes in a stack of fins, then expanding the tubes so they grip the fins. U-shaped return bends join the open hairpin ends and are brazed or soldered. Patents on the process describe separate stations for belling and expanding, which made production slow and costly. The expander also has to cope with different coil heights, because the length of the two straight legs sets the finished height. Each hand-off and each brazed joint is a place for a robot to take over from a worker.

Panasonic air conditioner compressors on a shelf, the heart of the sealed refrigerant circuit. Photo: Dinkun Chen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Demand is pushing the factories. In June 2026 Reuters reported a sales boom for Asian makers in Europe's heat wave, with LG saying a South Korean plant had run at full capacity since April and Midea's PortaSplit selling so well that second-hand prices passed new ones. German e-commerce sales rose about 37 percent in May, and shipments to Spain and France rose 108 percent. On 21 September 2026 Samsung broke ground on a 240 billion won HVAC line in Gwangju for FlaktGroup. In October TCL showed dealers its Guangzhou Intelligent Manufacturing Base, which has three automated factories and 10 intelligent production lines.

ABB equipment on the line at Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

ABB already works on appliance lines that share the sealed refrigerant circuit. At Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil, YuMi and GoFa cobots run gas leak detection and electrical tests, and ABB says the change raised the productivity of those tests by more than 68 percent. Electrolux first asked ABB to automate leak detection in 2018. Every air conditioner also gets a leak test before it ships, so the same task applies. See ABB robot use cases for more examples.

A dual arm YuMi working at a refrigerator line at Electrolux in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a project on an air conditioner line, so the rest is a possibility. An IRB 1300 or IRB 1600 could carry a brazing torch or an induction head along coil joints, with the path programmed and tested first in RobotStudio. An IRB 660 can stack finished outdoor units on pallets, and a GoFa can feed or tend a compressor test stand beside a worker. Our post on heat pump manufacturing covers the brazing side in more depth.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What the next air conditioner line needs

Factories are adding capacity quickly. Carrier is weighing a $433.8 million plant at AllianceTexas near Fort Worth, a project that was still pending in September 2026, and Samsung's Gwangju line is due to reach full operation in early 2028. Lines like these will mix many models in small batches, from portable units to split systems. Portable units cost 400 to 1,000 euros each, according to Sixth Tone, so every minute saved per unit counts. A robot cell must handle many variants, and GoFa's hand guiding and ABB's Wizard programming let technicians retrain a sequence without writing code.

An ABB IRB 1600ID arc welding robot at work, the kind of arm that could carry a joining torch. Photo: ABB

Several problems remain. New refrigerants such as propane are flammable, so brazing and leak testing need strict controls on what is inside the circuit. Robots must be fenced or slowed where people work beside them, which SafeMove handles on ABB controllers. Skilled brazers are scarce, and the cost of a robot cell has to pay back across every variant. For homes, the payoff would be units that leak less and cost less to build, though that depends on makers choosing to automate.

An ABB GoFa cobot at a gas leak and electrical test station on Electrolux's refrigerator line in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com