The IOR Annual Dinner, which took place in London on 22 February, provided the backdrop for rewarding exceptional individual achievement in advancing the RACHP industry as well as honouring businesses’ commitment to sustainability with the brand new Beyond Refrigeration Environmental Award.

Five awards were presented by IOR President Graeme Fox during the evening:

The J&E Hall Gold Medal recognises the most noteworthy practical contribution to the field of innovation in refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump technology. This year’s winner is Prof. Yulong Ding for his unique contribution to the storage and managing renewable energy. Using liquid energy storage, the technologies that he has developed are already being used commercially in cold chain applications and cooled containers, as well as energy facilities such as Highview Power in Birmingham. The judges agreed that they have tremendous potential for the future. So, for their work on liquid air energy storage, and composite phase change materials for thermal energy storage for Heat and Cold.

Professor Yulong Ding is the founding Chamberlain Chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham and Director of Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage and of UoB-AnSteel Joint Centre for Industrial Decarbonization Technologies. He will present an overview of his award-winning work to IOR members later this year.

Elias Eid, now a researcher at Food Chain London South Bank University, was honoured with the Ted Perry Award for Student Research for his work on reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from the retail sector in Europe. The judges highlighted his work as “having improved international understanding of how the retail food sector can effectively achieve decarbonization and shift towards a net-zero carbon.  This holistic approach is providing a clear path towards understanding of individual energy and carbon reduction potentials across various scenarios and countries.” 

The IOR’s RACHP Engineering Technician Section makes an award to an individual who has spent their whole career in a hands-on role, having displayed exceptional dedication to their customers, employers, and their sector. This year’s winner is Terrie Lamb of CiMetrics. Judges who interviewed him remarked “Terrie has gone on to achieve a Level 3 NVQ and his Engineering Council EngTech registration. He has demonstrated a passion for the RACHP industry with not only impressive continued professional development, but also by proactively passing his extensive knowledge on to apprentices. His enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, mentoring younger engineers and his determination to help fill the skills gap is clear to see.  He is also active in supporting the industry outside of his job commitments as Vice Chair of CIBSE HSCE Region.”

The Lightfoot Medal awarded for the best IOR Talk and Paper of the 2022/23 session was made to Robert Unsworth FInstR for his paper “Is money best spent on efficient design or service in refrigeration”. The winner of this award is made by vote of IOR members. You can read the paper and see the recording of the presentation on the IOR website.

The new IOR Beyond Refrigeration Environmental Award which rewards a project demonstrating the achievements of our sector in reducing environmental emissions from cooling in the UK, went to Sustain for their work on Circular Economy for the Cooling Industry. Talking about the project, judges said “Sustain’s approach provides a game-changing solution to the management of ageing commercial refrigeration assets to ensure Zero to Landfill by focusing on the reuse of parts from waste, repairing for reuse, repurposing the foam to avoid incineration, and ensuring recycling routes offer true circular economy.  Their end-to-end process is making a significant impact in reducing carbon emissions and VOCs from foam incineration, from their own processing that uses renewable resources and from their sustainable process for reusable steel re-manufacturing. The approach has helped to save 12,897 tonnes co2 emissions over the past 12 months, returned 156,302 kW energy to the National Grid from the Waste Plant and diverted an estimated 4,704 tonnes of industry waste from landfill by dismantling and recycling over 17,000 refrigeration cabinets”.

Yulong Ding, Elias Eid and Sustain have been invited to give talks to IOR members in the next papers programme to share their work in more detail with the RACHP Community.

To find out more about the awards that the IOR makes each year and how to enter for next year, visit the awards pages on our website.