The Institute of Refrigeration hosted the IOR’s 118th Annual Dinner on 22 February 2018. IOR President Steve Gill FInstR made the following awards to celebrating the achievement of some of our industry’s leading individuals.

Christina Francis PhD of London South Bank University was presented with the Ted Perry Award for Student Research, sponsored by Hawco, for her extensive study into the direct and indirect impact of carbon emissions from refrigerated transport systems. The particular focus of this research was on the growing area of supermarket home delivery vehicles.  The results have provided new insights into the causes of direct emissions through refrigerant leakage and led to the redesign of key component by a major UK transport manufacturer. This research has been described as “transformative” in the transport industry, with the knowledge generated resulting in new components being manufactured, adopted and used by the industry across the world. 

The Service Engineers Section Lifetime Achievement Award, supported by ACR Trainee of the Year,   was given to Keith Simmons, from Flowright Services ltd for a lifetime of service to the RACHP industry. With a career spanning over 45 years, Keith has been working for many of the industry’s flagship names including Total Refrigeration, Stanleys, PNS Williams and for the last 17 years Flowright. When talking about Keith, his employer said “Nothing is too much trouble. He often spends his own time working to help out less experience engineers, he has a great knowledge of the industry, an exemplary attitude and is a major asset to our engineering team”. After 45 years Keith still enjoys keeping up to date, methodically working through and solving problems, helping the more junior engineers and making sure the customer is happy when he leaves. 

Rob Lamb from Star Refrigeration was the recipient for the Lightfoot Medal for the best evening paper. This accolade which is decided by member vote was awarded to Rob for his talk on Refrigerant choices for small scale industrial refrigeration 

Professor Eckhard Groll was awarded the Institute of Refrigeration’s J&E Hall International Gold Medal for his contribution to the field of compressor evolution. This work has helped manufacturers to improve existing compressor design, test new design concepts and shorten development times.  He has achieved this through the development and application of comprehensive simulation models for a range of hermetic positive displacement compressors.  He and his thermal systems research team have modelled scroll, rolling piston, reciprocating, linear, rotating spool, bowtie, Z-, and S-RAM compressors for various refrigerants including carbon dioxide.  In his post as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in the USA, he has also gained international recognition for his contribution to teaching, research and inspiring students. It is estimate that during his career he has advised 24 doctoral students, 68 masters students, 69 undergraduate research students, 76 visiting associates and 9 post-doctoral researchers.