In short. The S, T and H families publish R134a. For a platform being designed now this settles one input and opens two: which region the platform is aimed at, and what development timeline it is working to. A different refrigerant is not a substitution on a datasheet — it changes the envelope, the materials and the controls, so it is opened as a development conversation and confirmed in writing.
What the catalog entry is
The published field reads refrigerant in supplied catalog, and its value for the S, T and H families is R134a. The wording is deliberate: it describes the document this website works from, not a claim about what any machine could be built to run on.
Read that way, it settles one selection input cleanly. The remaining refrigerant questions in an OEM programme are not about what the catalog says — they are about what the programme needs and when.
Why a change is development
It is tempting to treat refrigerant as a line item that can be swapped. In a centrifugal machine it is closer to a design premise.
The refrigerant sets the operating envelope the impellers are arranged around, so a different fluid does not simply flow through the same machine at the same points. It carries different material and lubricant compatibility requirements. It has its own safety classification, which can change what the machine room has to provide. And it changes the control assumptions, because pressure-temperature behaviour is what the control strategy is written against.
None of that makes a change impossible. It makes it a development conversation with its own scope and schedule, which is why this site opens it that way rather than answering it from a specification sheet.
The target region comes first
Refrigerant regulation is jurisdictional. Availability, phase-down steps and their timing are set market by market, and they do not move together.
The practical consequence for an OEM is that the target region is not commercial detail to be settled after engineering — it decides which refrigerant conversation is relevant at all. A platform intended for one market and a platform intended for several are different programmes, and the difference shows up in the refrigerant decision before it shows up anywhere else.
This page deliberately does not reproduce any jurisdiction's schedule. Those change, they are specific, and getting them right for a particular programme is work for your own regulatory advisers. What belongs here is the reason the question has to be asked early.
Where this sits in a programme
A chiller platform has a long life relative to the pace at which refrigerant policy moves. That mismatch is the real planning problem, and it has a shape worth naming.
Early in a programme, refrigerant is cheap to decide and expensive to leave open, because so much else is arranged around it. Late in a programme it is the reverse: the decision is effectively made, and revisiting it means revisiting the platform. The window where the conversation is genuinely useful is therefore narrow and early.
That is the argument for putting the refrigerant and the target region into the first application brief rather than the third. Not because a decision has to be final at that point, but because knowing whether the programme is inside or outside the published catalog changes what the rest of the conversation is about.
How to raise it in the brief
Three lines are usually enough to make the conversation productive: the requested refrigerant, the target region or regions, and the product-development timeline the platform is working to.
With those, the review can be about which family fits and what the open questions are. Without them, a selection can be made against a duty point and still turn out to be provisional — which is the more expensive way to discover the same information.
Source basis
Published ChillerRotor catalog refrigerant fields for the S, T and H series (CAT-202607-P06/P07/P08). Regulatory timelines are jurisdiction-specific and are not reproduced here; they are cited as a reason to establish the target region early, not as advice.
Independent standards and regulation
These are external to this catalog and were checked against the issuing body before being cited. They define the method or the rule; they do not validate any value published on this site.
- Regulation (EU) 2024/573 — The current EU F-gas Regulation, adopted 7 February 2024 and applying from 11 March 2024. It sets the HFC phase-down against a 2015 baseline of roughly 176 Mt CO2 equivalent, stepping to 24.3 % from 2025 and 12.3 % from 2027. The phase-down governs quantities placed on the EU market for the first time.
- European Commission — F-gas legislation — The Commission's own summary of the legislation and its implementing acts, useful for checking whether a step date has moved since this page was written.
Catalog values describe the documents this website works from. They are not a performance guarantee for a delivered unit, and project values are confirmed in writing. Read the source policy