The University of Notre Dame is part of a new National Science Foundation (NSF) Gen-4 Engineering Research Center (ERC) called EARTH, which stands for Environmental Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub. Led by the University of Kansas, EARTH will bring together 80 institutions and researchers from a wide array of disciplines. In addition to Notre Dame, the University of Maryland, the University of Hawai’i, the University of South Dakota and Lehigh University will serve as core university partners.

All partners will collaborate around a shared goal: creating a sustainable refrigerant economy.

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The first stream focuses on innovative ways to handle current refrigerants. Notre Dame researchers will develop new, more economical ways to separate HFCs to reuse or recycle them. A second research stream aims to achieve safer refrigerants that maintain or improve performance but do not negatively affect Earth’s atmosphere over time. Notre Dame will do computational prediction work for this stream in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi. As part of a third stream, researchers at Notre Dame will pioneer technologies that will increase the energy efficiency of refrigeration systems to reduce the electricity demand on the grid.