Produced by the Office of Marketing and Communications
By Beth Panitz
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) this month awarded $2.5 million to the University of Maryland and partners for research to improve the safety and performance of heat pumps that use refrigerants that are environmentally friendly but flammable.
The project is supported by DOE’s Buildings Energy Efficiency Frontiers and Innovation Technologies (BENEFIT) program, which aims to decarbonize buildings, reduce peak demand on the electric grid and lower energy costs by supporting new innovations and making existing technologies more accessible.
The UMD research team that will tackle the project—which follows a $2.3 million DOE grant to develop cold-climate heat pumps—is led by Center for Environmental Energy Engineering Director Reinhard Radermacher and Co-Directors Yunho Hwang and Vikrant Aute and Department of Fire Protection Engineering Professor Peter B. Sunderland. Both projects will tap into the expertise of researchers in CEEE’s Consortium for Energy Efficiency and Heat Pumps.
“Heat pumps play an important role in decarbonizing the heating, ventilation and air conditioning segment,” said Hwang. “With both of these DOE projects, CEEE will help innovate heat pumps that can safely take advantage of environmentally friendly, but flammable, refrigerants, furthering the sustainability of this technology.”
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