Project Earth

 

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.

Circular diagram showing a refrigerant management system with three main 'Thrusts': Thrust 1 (Reclamation & Repurposing) in green, Thrust 2 (Novel & Safe Refrigerants) in orange, and Thrust 3 (Energy Efficient Systems) in blue. The diagram shows various processes including SEPARATE, RECYCLE, REPURPOSE, NEW REFRIGERANTS, NEW MATERIALS, EXISTING SYSTEMS, and NEW SYSTEMS, all connected by colored arrows indicating flow paths for current (orange) and new (blue) refrigerants. The outer ring divides the system into research areas like 'Convergent Research,' 'Impact & Belonging,' 'Innovation Ecosystem,' and 'Engineering Workforce Dev.' Cross-cutting categories appear at the bottom: 'Synthesis & Char.,' 'Behavior & Policy,' and 'Modeling & Analysis.' Numbers like 1.1-3.3 appear throughout, likely indicating specific processes or connections.