There are cars running on motor ways and freeways, which is a pretty common scene in the modern life. When looking inside the cars, not into their cabins but into to their internal mechanical structures, and we will notice that the most high-speed operationg part, namely, their engines, are dissipating heat from time to time. It is quite important to have something that are able to bring away the overheat and cool down the combustion chamber in order to ensure the whole auto system functioning normally. That is just what auto radiators are used for. With coolant flowing inside the silicone radiator hose and air flowing outside the radiator cores, heat will eventually be released into the atmosphere.

Apart from the constant innovation about cooling technology which is creating a higher radiation efficiency, the matirial applied on the radiators has also changed. In the past, automotive radiators are usually made of cooper, yet nowadys, cars in increasing number begin to adopt aluminum as the main material for their radiators. This transition started from aluminumr acing radiators, for racing cars are always the revolution pioneers in the car industry. After the successful attempt of aluminum racing radiators in competitions, the usage is becoming wider and wider. Autos like sedans, sedan trucks, light trucks and motor coaches have mostly completed the conversion while heavy trucks are already in preparation.

So, why does this transformation appears on earth? Here are some reasons which are currently considered to accout for the phenomenon. First, the most obvious one is the lightness that alumina element has. To show it in a more figurative way, we can compare the density of cooper and aluminum under the same system of unit. It turns out that 8.9 corresponds to copper while 2.7 corresponds to aluminum, which means that for a cooper radiator and a aluminum radiator with exactly the same sructure, the latter one will be two-third lighter than the former one. Since the general tendency of the development of cars industry is to produce them in a more lightweight way, aluminum indeed has an absolute advantage.

Next, it is about the a comparision on performances between these two material, cooper and aluminum. According to what I have mentioned at the beginning, both the outer part and the inner part of auto radiators have their own task. To be more specific, the inner part is a radiating pipe that contains coolant flowing around the engine, and the outer part is some wavy metal plates contacting air as much as possible. And the principle is to weld the pipe with the plates so that when the coolant conducts the heat absorbed from the engine to the metal part, the metal part will send it out to the atmosphere. The points are as follows. Although cooper owns a higher thermal conductivity than aluminum and it can provide a faster heat dissipation, aluminum's heat conduction ability is pretty enough for usage. However, when it comes to the producing process, aluminum enjoys definite superiority. While welding the radiator pipe with the metal plates, cooper can make the welding area to, at most, 80 percent, whereas aluminum can make it to 90 at least. Togather with a fewer amount of spot welding, it is no hard to tell that products in aluminum are much firmer than those in cooper. What's more, aluminum is more lively than cooper as a metal and to shape it does not need very strict conditions like strong acids which are pretty necessary for cooper, as a result, it can be more environmentally friendly in manufacture.

The last aspect I want to say is about the sources of raw material. It is well known that aluminum is the third most element contained in the Earth curst while the amount of cooper is even not on the top list. Nevertheless, people started to mine and use cooper since approximately 6000 years ago while the application of aluminum is only about 200 years. All these factors lead to an inevitable result that there are much more aluminum remaining on the earth than cooper and along with the popularization of aluminum, it will become cheaper and cheaper. Cooper, on the other hand, will go to the exactly opposite side.