Brian Suggitt, MD, Systemair, and Chairman, Eurovent Middle East

Dubai, UAE, 29 January 2019: Eurovent Middle East highlighted opportunities to reduce the energy bill in cold store facilities in the latest edition of the industry association’s HVACR Leadership Workshop series, held on January 28, in Dubai. Brian Suggitt, Managing Director, Systemair, and Chairman, Eurovent Middle East, kick-started the seminar by highlighting the valuable role cold chain plays in food safety and reducing food waste, underscoring how the solutions to be presented by international guest speakers and local experts will help retailers “do more with less”.

John Austin-Davies, former Chair of the British Refrigeration Association and former Director of EPTA UK

Delivering a presentation on energy-efficient refrigeration in food retail stores, John Austin-Davies, former Chair of the British Refrigeration Association and former Director of EPTA UK, said that innovation must take into account the basic requirements of ensuring the preservation of food at the right temperature with no compromise on short- and long-term reliability. “Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD),” he said, “allows us to introduce technologies, where airflow is optimised by airflow-management devices, which can help achieve double-digit energy savings.” He also discussed the global move towards natural refrigerants and the need for training to ensure proper installations.

Jan Svallingson, Director, Business Development, Frico

Jan Svallingson, Director, Business Development, Systemair-Frico, discussed how air curtains can be used to reduce thermal energy losses in the retail sector. The solution, he said, is more hygienic, enhances visibility, offers a safer working environment and reduces maintenance cost, whereas PVC strips are prone to ice build-up because of the condensation. Svallingson highlighted energy savings achieved with case studies of projects in Asia and concluded his presentation with the announcement that Frico is working on releasing an air curtain for trucks in the coming months. “We have done some tests in Europe and Thailand,” he said. “We want to test it here with the high temperature conditions.”

Alexander Abrass, Sales Director of Cooling, MENA, Danfoss

Discussing energy efficiency within smart stores, Alexander Abrass, Sales Director of Cooling, MENA, Danfoss Turkey, Middle East and Africa, spoke on how a holistic approach can convert existing challenges, such as customer demand, profit margins and unclear regulations, into opportunities to save money, stressing that “whenever we are enhancing systems, we are protecting the food”. Abrass underscored the importance of providing end-to-end smart solutions to customers, which could include simple monitoring and management systems and HVACR integration. “We want supermarkets that are generating energy during the day and selling to the grid,” he said. “This is smart energy.”

Arul Joseph, Director – Digital Solutions, Data Enabled Business, Johnson Controls – GCC

Arul Joseph, Director- Digital Solutions, Data Enabled Business, Johnson Controls – GCC, spoke on the shift from stand-alone systems to connected and converged digital platforms that facilitate integration of data for actionable insights. He said: “Typically, 100 meters and sensors and more than 50 sub-systems are at work in a 10,000-square-metre building, generating more than 100 variations of the data, because markets differ and usages of buildings differ, as do the way the buildings are designed and installed. Between the various sub-systems, close to half a million sample data points are captured every day, which equates to more than 10 gigabytes of data, annually. If you collect data from 300-400 such-sized buildings, it would be more than the entire data generated by all the users pressing the ‘Like’ button in Facebook in the course of a year – that is how enormous the data from buildings is.” Joseph also underscored how data can identify opportunities in terms of performance leaks, to ensure energy savings, better efficiency, increase lifecycle and provide predictive service, which can deploy an FM personnel before a failure can occur, reducing downtime and operational cost.

Marco Duarte, BDM, ebm-papst Middle East

Representing ebm-papst Middle East, Marco Duarte, Business Development Manager, discussed the benefits of choosing EC technology, underscoring the heavy consumption that fans impose on the building sector and highlighting redundancy as a benefit in addition to energy savings, in a wide range of applications. Duarte also discussed case studies of air conditioning and refrigeration retrofits in the retail sector.

Markus Lattner, MD, Eurovent Middle East

Markus Lattner, Managing Director, Eurovent Middle East, concluded the workshop with an announcement on the development of a working group for refrigeration and cold storage with the aim of bringing the industry together to deliver recommendations that could be brought forward with the local municipality in the move towards establishing minimum standards. Lattner said this is the third working group the association introduced, with two ongoing working groups on air conditioning focusing on establishing SEER standards in Saudi Arabia and another, on air distribution and filtration, working closely with Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council.

Hannah Jo Uy is Assistant Editor at Climate Control Middle East magazine. She may be contacted at hannah@cpi-industry.com