Next-gen A/C

Your vehicle's air-conditioning system uses the same vapor-compression chilling cycle that your kitchen refrigerator does, a classic technology that has dominated vehicle-cooling applications since A/C units were first installed in autos midway through the last century. But rising concerns about climate change have led environmental regulators to begin a two-decade “phase-down” of the use of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, synthetic compounds that can trap a thousand times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide alone.

For that reason the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-e) has funded research during the past few years on a range of innovative cooling concepts that do not rely on or could significantly reduce the use of the vapor-compression cycle to chill air. Much of the financial support for this work has come through the agency's Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices (BEETIT) program. Although many of these emerging technologies are intended for air-conditioning residential and commercial buildings, some of them are potentially small, cheap, and efficient enough to consider for vehicular applications.