RD&T was set up in August 2009 by ex University of Bristol, FRPERC (Food Refrigeration and Process Engineering Research) employees. The company involves Judith Evans, Tim Brown, Alan Foster and Edward Hammond and offers a unique service that transfers research knowledge into industrial projects. 

Judith Evans 

Judith Evans has 23 years experience of working on food refrigeration operations.  During this period she has carried out work on frozen storage of meat, consumer handling of food and studies to improve the performance of domestic and commercial refrigerators, energy labelling, instrumentation performance, decontamination of food, cook-chill systems, novel refrigeration systems, optimising refrigeration systems and improving performance and temperature control in chilled and frozen storage rooms. 

Professionally she is:

• A Fellow of the IOR (Institute of Refrigeration)
• Member of the IOR national Technical Committee
• Member of the IIR (International Institute of Refrigeration) C2 (food science and engineering) and D1 (retail display cabinets) committees
• Member of the IIR (International Institute of Refrigeration) energy labelling working party
• UK, international IOR representative to the IIR
  
• An editor of the Journal of Food Engineering.

Alan Foster

Alan's main interests and key skills are in heat transfer and fluid dynamics.  He has used these skills in a variety of applications including cold storage, retail display, bacterial death kinetics and air cycle refrigeration.

Alan's main areas of interest are: 

• Air flow in refrigerated retail display cabinets
• Infiltration through cold storage room doors
• Air curtains
• Supermarket refrigeration and air conditioning
• Ventilation and containment
  
• Air cycle refrigeration

Tim Brown

Tim's work has been primarily related to heat and mass transfer and the interaction between product and equipment factors in food processing, including

• development and optimisation of novel and improved thermal processes (refrigeration, freezing, thawing and cooking)
• decontamination of foods (steam and organic acid application)
• separation processes (e.g. cutting of meat, frozen fish, slicing of salmon etc.)
• reducing energy use in refrigeration
• air cycle refrigeration systems for combined cooking and low temperature freezing
• secondary refrigeration systems for supermarkets
• humidification of retail display cabinets and food store rooms
• application of improved vacuum insulation to the food and food equipment industries
• mathematical modelling of heat and mass transfer.

Edward Hammond

Ed is a chartered mechanical engineer with a broad base of engineering skills ranging from theoretical and academic through to practical engineering.  With his commercial and academic experience in refrigeration system design, development and optimisation he uses both practical and analytical techniques (such as computational fluid dynamics and mathematical modelling) in solving problems with existing systems or designing new systems from scratch.