As Japan’s air conditioning market heats up, copper is helping it be energy smart too.
Room-type air-conditioners are now an integral part of Japanese housing, often used in every room in the home and seen as essential for modern life. In fact despite warnings that the market had reached saturation point, sales keep rising-up from around 8 million per year in 2010 to nearly 9.5 million in 2013.
The challenge for the industry is how to keep making them ever more energy efficient. Copper is at least one part of the solution because the more copper tubes are featured in AC heat exchanges, the greater the energy savings.
For a while cutting the diameter of copper tubing from 7 mm to 5 mm delivered better energy performance, but to keep improving the AC industry needed to find a smarter way to use more copper without making both the indoor and outdoor units too big for Japanese homes or balconies.
But in 2015, Shizuoka Works, Living Environment Group, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. had a breakthrough by introducing copper tubes about 2.2 times longer than conventional ones and in the process changed AC manufacturing as it had been done for nearly 50 years.
Dubbed the “Personal Twin Flow”, the new air conditioners introduced a reconfigured propeller system to create more space inside the units for the expanded heat exchanges where the length of copper tubes went from 38.7 meters to 88.2 meters to deliver 5 times the energy efficiency of the earlier model.
Shizuoka Works uses approximately 10K tons of copper for the 1.2 million indoor and outdoor air conditioners it makes each year. Copper is also used for compressors and the fan motor coils and here too a lot of effort is going into improving energy efficiency, but that’s a whole other story.
ICA Japan: http://www.jcda.or.jp
