RD&T recently received the fantastic news that they had achieved ISO9001, ISO14001 and ISO18001 accreditations.

ISO accreditation is something we have been working on since the company was set up in 2009 and so we are delighted to have achieved all accreditations at the first attempt. We believe it is quite unusual for a company (especially an SME) to complete all three ISO accreditations at one time as there is a tremendous amount of work involved in developing the quality procedures required for the rigorous assessment.

Minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) are currently being developed for a number of refrigerated appliances. These mean that manufacturers can only sell products within Europe that exceed the MEPS. Manufacturers need to be prepared to ensure that their products reach these MEPS. Consultation documents from Lot 1 (Refrigerating and Freezing Equipment) have recently been published.

The fresh convenience cold chain was an area discussed by RD&Ts Judith Evans at the Freshconex exhibition in Berlin recently.  The exhibition which covers almost all the halls at Berlin’s massive Messe exhibition centre must be one of the largest food trade shows in the world.

Can cold store operators raise the temperature in their cold stores was the question posed by Judith Evans at the 13th Cold Chain Logistics conference in Amsterdam recently.  Raising the temperature of cold stores is an interesting idea that has been debated for some time.  Raising the evaporating temperature by 1°C should in theory reduce energy consumption by 2-3% and so this is not an insignificant saving, especially if temperature could be raised by several degrees. In the UK cold stores are often maintained at -22/-23°C and this is for a variety of reasons that were outlined in Judith’s presentation.

Congratulations go to RD&T’s Ed Hammond who has recently been named as IMechE Food Process Engineer of the Year. The prize sponsored by the PM Group is awarded each year for the best paper relating to the food industry.

RD&T's Alan Foster is currently spending a month in China working with Professor Ruhe Xie at Guangzhou University.  Professor Xie's work focuses on refrigerated transport and his University has some unique facilities available for research.  One of these is a specialised test facility to simulate containers during transit, in which surrounding air speeds of up to 80 mph can be produced.  Alan is currently working with the team in Guangzhou to carry out tests on infiltration into containers and to model the effects of infiltration using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

At RD&T we generally design, develop and test refrigeration systems.  However, a new project recently extended our work into an area far flung from engineering.  Ed Hammond was approached by Sarah Wilton an art student from UWE (University of the West of England).  She had the idea of developing a refrigerated piece of art as part of her art degree.

The Food Refrigeration and Process Engineering Research Centre (FRPERC) has long been established as the leading research centre in the UK for work on refrigeration and food.  When the University of Bristol decided to close FRPERC at the end of July 2009 there was general shock within the UK refrigeration industry.  The group contained over 200 years of experience and was a valuable source of knowledge gained over many years as part of the Meat Research Institute, AFRC Institute of Food Research and latterly as part of the University of Bristol.

Members of FRPERC have now set up a company to preserve the knowledge base and continue the refrigeration work carried out at FRPERC.