Research Overview

EARTH will confront the scientific, engineering, social, economic, and political issues that are critical to addressing the continually evolving challenges facing the refrigeration and air conditioning ecosystem

1. Develop “transformative refrigerants” that have a balance of properties such as environmental, toxicity, flammability, stability, energy efficiency, system complexity, price, recyclability, and long-term availability

2. Promote the recycling of refrigerants (e.g. billions of kilograms are in use today) so that blend components can be recovered as pure compounds and reused in new more environmentally friendly formulations or repurposed into new materials that are environmentally safe and uniquely functional

3. Develop next-generation cooling technologies with higher energy efficiency than current vapor-compression technologies using high fidelity experiments, advanced atomistic simulations, data science methods, and rigorous process design

EARTH will create the first sustainable refrigerant lifecycle engineered system that tackles the technical, environmental, and societal challenges of the Heating, Ventilation, Air-conditioning, and Refrigeration (HVACR) industry that aligns with national research ideas and the importance of chemical research to the U.S. economy.

Diagram of Refrigerant Lifecycle with the three thrusts, Lower Emissions, Novel & Safe Refrigerants, and Increase Energy Efficiency as well as the three crosscuts Synthesis & Characterization, Behavior & Policy, and Modeling & Analysis — EARTH will create the first sustainable refrigerant lifecycle engineered system that tackles the technical, environmental, and societal challenges of the Heating, Ventilation, Air-conditioning, and Refrigeration (HVACR) industry that aligns with national research ideas and the importance of chemical research to the U.S. economy.

NSF ERC Program Model with the various disciplines that contribute to the program — The EARTH 3-Plane Strategic Planning Chart that identifies fundamental knowledge, testbeds, and barriers to overcome.