Abstract: China is a copper importing country with scarce copper resources, high dependence on foreign countries, and insufficient pricing power, while aluminum resources are abundant, making it a major exporter of aluminum. Copper prices continue to remain high and are on the rise, putting increasing cost pressure on air conditioning companies, and the demand for “aluminum replacing copper” is becoming increasingly urgent. In order to study the feasibility of aluminum tube evaporators in household split machines, based on experimental research, an analysis and evaluation were conducted from three aspects: performance, reliability, and manufacturability. Through experiments, it was found that in terms of performance, under the same pipe diameter, the performance of aluminum tube evaporators is about 1.5% lower than that of copper tube evaporators; In terms of reliability, optimizing the design of copper aluminum solder joints in the flow path and selecting stainless steel materials can meet the requirements of pipe pulling, electrical safety, and corrosion resistance; In terms of manufacturability, although the automatic welding rate has decreased, the overall number of welding points is not large, which has a small impact on actual production. At the same time, welding problems can be solved through integrated end plate design or replacement of stainless steel material.

Key words: Aluminum instead of copper, Aluminum tube evaporator, Feasibility analysis