Raising energy standards in refrigeration – that’s cool!

New product range and improved energy standards for refrigeration manufacturers, Bond Display Cabinets.

When a manufacturer of large refrigeration cabinets decided to improve their product range, compete with fierce competition and meet new energy standards they called on the expertise at London South Bank University to help them out.

LSBU air conditioning and refrigeration experts, Judith Evans and Alan Foster, jumped on board this Knowledge Transfer Partnership project in order to transfer refrigeration cabinet design and development technology and allow the company to be technically as well as financially independent from its Italian parent.

The KTP has proved a major success and since new technical capabilities have been introduced, Bond now have the in-house capabilities to design, test and manufacture refrigerator cabinets, not only meeting industry standards but also conforming to the necessary low energy requirements. This has meant £560,000 worth of new sales and a far stronger customer base. “At the moment a lot of UK supermarkets are still buying their refrigerators abroad, as it is cheaper, but the carbon footprint implications of bringing the cabinets back into the country are huge. Meeting the design and price specifications of our customers will encourage them to ‘buy British’ and hopefully further increase our customer base,” reports Matt Longhurst, company supervisor at Bond.

A major breakthrough for Bond was the work Samir Barve, KTP Associate, carried out, evaluating and securing new CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software. “CFD allows you to create a prototype design cabinet in a virual test room and get the test results back in just a few hours. Without CFD it would take a very expensive month to get the same results back,” comments Samir. The new software has reduced development time from 6 months to 2 months, saving time and money. “Before the CFD, designing cabinets was a long winded process; trial and error, making prototypes, testing, re-testing…now we can go in and test something straight away that has been proven by the CFD software,” confirms Matt.

In addition, an in-house test facility was developed that allows the company to test its own designs without having to use external agencies, allowing greater flexibility and design modifications in the design and testing process. Tests were carried out to check temperature performance, calculate energy consumption and provide verification of the CFD results. Air flow issues were also identified using the CFD software and the design has since changed to get smooth and uniform air flow.

But Samir and team did not stop there, 5 new cabinets were developed and tested resulting in a 20% increase of £560,000 in current sales and future potential sales of £3m.

When asked how the KTP has affected the company a united opinion was formed. “Within our company we always lacked that academic backup. We now have the theory and qualifications to match our experience,” praises Matt, “the KTP has changed the way we do things, we now have a proper plan and approach that we inherited from the academics on this project.” Samir also speaks very highly of the scheme and says “I had a lot of flexibility in my work and I had constant support from both the academics and the company – I had excellent training.”

In fact this project has gone so well that an additional shorter KTP programme has been taken on to install new knowledge of safety, operations, optimisation, and design of integral display cabinets operating on Hydrocarbons (HCs).