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Keep cool under high pressure: new KME copper alloy for eco-friendly cooling

As environmental guidelines get stricter, a number of long established refrigerants
will need to be replaced by new, more eco-friendly solutions. In order to meet the higher technical demands these substances place on systems, KME has developed tubes made of a high-strength copper-iron alloy that also achieves significant installation cost savings.


KME has offered outstanding copper materials for tubing used in refrigeration and air conditioning systems for a long time – materials that are easy to work with, long-living, recyclable, economical and eco-friendly. New refrigerants for stricter environmental conformity are now emerging, such as CO2 (carbon dioxide), which is in many cases the optimal solution: climate-neutral, energy-efficient, nontoxic, non-flammable, especially eco-friendly and therefore future-proof. Like any other of these new refrigerants, also CO2 is placing completely new demands on the design of tube connection lines in refrigeration systems. These eco-friendly solutions can only be utilized under much higher working pressure than refrigerants used up to now.

Higher pressures would require established KME tube materials such as Cu-DHP to have greater wall thickness. KME has countered the resulting problem of higher material consumption and higher costs by developing a proprietary production process for the technically demanding but markedly stronger CuFe2P alloy especially for this application. Costs for refrigerant tubing throughout the whole refrigeration system can be significantly reduced by using this copper-iron alloy, as its higher material strength provides the necessary pressure stability with a lower wall thickness. Perfect workability adds another decisive economical effect to material advantages: Like any other copper alloy CuFe2P stands for easy and smooth hard-soldering.

Under the product name TECTUBE®_cips hp120 KME offers special connection tubes of the TECTUBE® brand range for refrigeration systems made by use of a high-strength copper alloy. These special tubes will optimize eco-friendly cooling under high pressures of up to 120 bar by offering all the technical and economical advantages of copper. With this product development KME is promoting the utilization of the ecologically sound refrigerant CO2, at present preferably used in modern supermarket refrigeration systems.
 

Contact KME: info-industrial-tube@kme.com