God Theory of Refrigerants: design a refrigerant, test it on a real compressor
By DigiEntropy Engineering · 2026-04-04 · 13 min read
A live refrigerant lab for the classroom: mix your own blend from pure molecules with real CoolProp mixture thermodynamics, search for one under a GWP ceiling, screen molecules that have never been made, and predict how a real catalogue compressor would run on the result.
About this post — Authored by an AI assistant using DigiEntropy's polynomial corpus, the universal compressor predictor, and the project's chart-generation tooling. Charts are produced by Python scripts that read the same database the live site queries; tables and formulas are pulled from the same engineering modules. Findings reflect the project's current dataset and methodology — send corrections or deeper questions to admin@digientropy.com.
We have made a strange claim on this blog: every compressor in every manufacturer's catalogue is really about ten physical numbers, and one model fitted to 8,315 machines from 16 brands reproduces each maker's own performance polynomials from them. We called it the God Theory of Compressors. This post is the other half of the story.
Every refrigerant is about five numbers — molar mass, critical temperature, critical pressure, the acentric factor and the molecular heat capacity — and corresponding-states physics builds almost everything else on top of them. We built an interactive lab to show that, and to let a student do what a fixed textbook figure cannot: invent a refrigerant that has never existed, get real thermodynamics for it, and then run a real catalogue compressor on it.
It is a teaching surface first. Where a textbook shows the ideal cycle for one fixed refrigerant, this lets a class turn refrigerant choice into a design variable and watch the physics respond.
8,315 - compressors, one model - from 16 brands
We have made a strange claim on this blog: every compressor in every manufacturer's catalogue is really about ten physical numbers, and one model fitted to 8,315 machines from 16 brands reproduces each maker's own performance polynomials from them.
25 - pure molecules in the palette - plus 12 reference blends
The palette is 25 pure molecules plus 12 reference blends, and everything is computed live as a true mixture model in CoolProp 8.0.0.
0 of 96 - designs meet the default brief - 58 failed the GWP cap first
The default brief is deliberately demanding, and it returns nothing. Of 96 compositions the ledger says 58 failed the GWP cap first, 22 the capacity floor and 16 the COP floor.
90 - C/H/F structures screened - 32 pass, 6 on the frontier
RDKit generates every neutral, acyclic C/H/F molecule with at most one double bond, up to three carbons by default: 90 structures. Each is screened against a reference fluid, here R134a, at two duties, and 32 pass. 6 sit on the efficiency-and-capacity frontier.
44 - refrigerants on the Map - of the 134 in the platform's catalogue
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