EIC Pathfinder Challenge: Clean and efficient cooling

Background and scope

Cooling is an essential process across many areas of society, important for human well-being, economic growth, sustainable urbanisation, reduction of food scarcity, and for socio-economic development. It presents relevant applications in sectors such as (i) built environment, heat, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), building health and comfort, interoperable urban energy systems, (ii) data centres, electronics and superconductors, (iii) food production (i.e. vertical farming), processing, storage and refrigerated transport, (iv) cold energy carriers production, transport and network integration (liquid H2, LNG, etc.), (v) chemical, metallurgical and hard to abate industries (including cryogenic carbon capture) and (vi) medical applications (e.g. vaccines that need refrigeration).

In terms of cooling technologies, vapour compression is the most widely applied method for air-conditioning and refrigeration. However, a wide range of alternative methods ha