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Image credit: The University of Kansas, Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH)
Heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration (HVACR) are essential to human quality of life but exact a significant environmental toll. Most current refrigerants are high-global-warming-potential (GWP) hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) with up to 4000 times the impact of CO2. High HVACR-associated energy consumption and HFC leaks account for 7.8% of total greenhouse-gas emissions. HFCs’ chemical stability, combined with challenges associated with separating HFC refrigerant blends into components, make sustainable recycling and repurposing of these refrigerants difficult. In addition, tightening U.S. regulations have created a market for illegal HFC imports. The American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act mandates an 85% phasedown of HFCs over the next two decades, but these challenges threaten that goal. Even if the technical goals are met, implementing such sweeping changes will require societal and industrial adoption and a greatly expanded U.S. HVACR workforce. The Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) Engineering Research Center (ERC) will use a team-science approach to bring together talent in engineering (chemical, environmental, mechanical, and materials), architecture, business, chemistry, economics, geography, history, law, psychology, and entrepreneurship in one Innovation Ecosystem to co-create convergent technical and societal solutions with industry partners, technical and community colleges, professional organizations, regulators, and end users. EARTH’s vision is to create a transformative “sustainable refrigerant lifecycle” to address the HVACR ecosystem’s key technical and societal challenges: (1) lowering HFC emissions, (2) creating safe, property-balanced replacement refrigerants, and (3) increasing HVACR energy efficiency. In addition, EARTH will work toward workforce goals co-created with industry to increase the number of HVACR engineering researchers and will involve community and technical colleges to address workforce gaps through coordinated outreach and training, with a focus on women, native people, and tribal nations.
With stakeholder input and integration across fundamental knowledge, enabling technologies, and system testbeds, EARTH will convergently address the societal problem of refrigerant environmental impacts. Refrigerant leaking and venting will be addressed by new separation, conversion, security-tagging, and waste-refrigerant-reuse technologies, spurring sustainable decision-making and new startups. Novel, safe, property-balanced, low-flammability, low environmental-impact refrigerants will be explored with molecular simulations of candidate fluids, development of solid-state materials, regulatory-impact economic analysis, and corporate-innovation insights. Higher HVACR energy efficiency will be obtainable through new energy-efficient dehumidification materials, refrigerant-specific leak sensors, alternative refrigeration cycles, systems modeling, lifecycle analysis, technoeconomic analysis, and exploration of corporate, environmental, social, and governance activities. Crosscut themes - Synthesis & Characterization, Behavior & Policy, and Modeling & Analysis - will integrate research with all ERC pillars. The EPA estimates the AIM Act’s successful implementation from 2022 to 2050 will net benefits of $272 billion and emission reductions of 4.6 billion tons of CO2. It will also create 150,000 new jobs, increase U.S. manufacturing by $39 billion, and prevent a 0.5 °C increase in global temperature. EARTH will enable and accelerate these benefits with new technologies, data-informed regulatory guidance, and industry and stakeholder buy-in. By addressing the technical, environmental, and societal challenges of replacing high-GWP refrigerants, EARTH’s research will generate scientific knowledge, engineering products, environmental-policy recommendations, and industry and stakeholder behavioral changes to stimulate this HVACR-ecosystem transformation. EARTH has identified over 70 initial HVACR-ecosystem partners, including companies, community colleges and technical/trade schools, non-profit organizations, international universities, and federal labs, to aid with industry adoption of new technologies. EARTH will increase the HVACR industry’s workforce capacity across 6 core institutions (3 EPSCoR), in partnership with native-Hawaiʻian-serving and tribal colleges/universities, community colleges, and technical/trade schools.
Editor’s note: The new NSF ERC EARTH center involves a wide range of collaborators from industry to community colleges to research universities. Read more about Mark Shiflett’s collaborative approach in last year’s Nexus article, Embracing Collaboration and Innovation.