To help celebrate 100 years of AIRAH, we're highlighting the people, places and things that have made significant contributions to Australia's HVAC&R industry.
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Throughout 2020, we'll be profiling 100 faces. Please check back throughout the year and find out about our long-serving AIRAH members, emerging leaders, notable places and incredible HVAC&R innovations.

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#001

Lord Kelvin

June 26, 1824 – December 17, 1907 

Lord Kelvin was an Irish-Scottish mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. He did much to unify the then-emerging discipline of physics in its modern form.  

While the existence of a lower limit to temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to Kelvin’s work, he is known for determining its correct value as approximately -273.15°C or -495.67°F. In his honour, absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin. 

​World Refrigeration Day is celebrated on June 26 to mark his birthday. 

​#002

Phillip Carruthers, F.AIRAH

A love of engineering and an approach based firmly on logic and understanding has helped Phillip Carruthers, F.AIRAH, build a career that spans 50+ years.

After 30-years at Norman Disney & Young and a short-lived retirement, he now serves as the Engineering Services Manager of CBRE Building Consultancy Group.

Carruthers' experience with AIRAH is almost as long as his time in the HVAC&R industry. He joined us in 1972 and served as national president from 2002–2003.

Read the q&a

​#003

Nicki Parker, M.AIRAH

Nicki Parker, M.AIRAH, is the sustainability lead for the Brisbane office of Norman Disney & Young. She is also the chair of AIRAH's Resilience Special Technical Group.

Making the move to Brisbane in 2016, her current role at NDY involves the growth and development of the engineering consultancy's sustainability offerings in Queensland. She looks forward to pushing the concept of performance-based sustainable, pragmatic design in to the future.

READ THE Q&A

​#004

Carlos Flores, M.AIRAH

Raised in Chile and residing in Australia for more than a decade, Carlos Flores, M.AIRAH, is a mechanical engineer by trade and the director of the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS).

Flores has been working with NABERS since 2009 and was initially drawn to the HVAC&R industry due to its potential to fight climate change and reduce energy use. With the looming challenge of creating a carbon-free future, he says he is encouraged by the industry's ability to adapt and innovative.

READ THE Q&A

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#005

Peta Blight, M.AIRAH

A mechanical engineer born, raised and now working in Perth, Peta Blight, M.AIRAH, is the WA committee diversity champion of the Women of AIRAH Special Technical Group. She also took home the "Future Leader" title at the 2017 AIRAH Awards – a category recognising emerging talent in the Australian HVAC&R industry.

These days Blight is part of the engineering team for CBH Group, Australia's largest co-operative. As the country's biggest exporter of grain, the company’s operations encompass grain storage, handling, transport, marketing and processing.

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Read the q&A

​​#006

Gwen Gray, L.AIRAH

Gwen Gray became AIRAH’s first full female member when she joined in 1967.

During World War II, Gray worked in the drawing office of the Department of Defence Production at Fishermen’s Bend in Melbourne, where Beaufort bombers and Beaufighters were manufactured. At war’s end, she was engaged by Bassett Consulting, where she worked as a mechanical engineer for 40 years.

Her impressive CV includes projects such as the Royal Melbourne Hospital boiler extensions in the early 1960s, and the construction of the Arts Centre Melbourne in the 70s. Gray also helped develop a para-professional course at RMIT for refrigeration and air conditioning.
Even today, women are a minority in HVAC&R; when Gray started her career, female HVAC&R workers were practically unheard of.
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“At the children’s hospital in 1960, when I went onto the sites the message would go around: ‘lady on site’,” Gray says. “There was a very courteous approach to women in those days, although we still were mistaken for secretaries. But once they got to know me and knew what I was talking about we got on famously.”

​​#007

Historical Ice Making Machine

After experiments in the early 1850s, James Harrison, Australia’s godfather of refrigeration, developed his mechanical ice machine in 1854. This was the precursor to his “Refrigerating Machine” – a vapour-compression system which Harrison patented in Victoria in 1855 and the United Kingdom in 1856. 

At a low temperature, the machine evaporated ether. At a high temperature, it condensed it – the reverse of ordinary evaporation processes. The ether was contained in air-tight vessels. A cylinder at its centre was fitted with valves, so that each stroke of a piston would withdraw a quantity of ether vapour from the left-hand side, forcing it into a condensing vessel on the right. 

Where the vapour was raised, an intense cold was produced. Where it was condensed, a corresponding degree of heat evolved. The ether, after resuming the liquid state, returned by self-regulating valve to the evaporating vessel and the process thus continued uninterruptedly. 
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The machine could produce 3,000kg of ice per day – effectively changing how meat, produce and (unsurprisingly) beer would be cooled and stored. While cooling technology has since been refined, Harrison’s ice making machine stands as the breakthrough for refrigeration as we know it today.  

#008

South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI)

Designed and built by a project team including Woods Bagot, Atelier Ten, Cundall, and Norman Disney & Young, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) accommodates more than 600 researchers from South Australia and elsewhere in about 25,000m2 of space. But despite the vital work going on inside the facility, SAHMRI is best known for its exterior.

The triangulated wrap-around façade resembles the surface of a pine-cone and has been designed for solar control, daylighting, glare control and thermal comfort. Parametric modelling determined the shape and size of the hoods in all locations, with the exact geometry of each modified on its orientation.

“Shallower hoods admit more daylight,” says Atelier Ten’s Paul Stoller, M.AIRAH. “Deeper hoods cut out direct sun, minimise glare, and even out daylighting within adjacent workplaces, where the desired light quality is more uniform and quiet.”
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SAHMRI opened its doors in December 2013, and has been landmark of Adelaide’s North Terrace ever since.

​​#009

The 1947 Journal

AIRAH boasts a distinguished history in publishing technical information.

Indeed, the first official journal debuted in July 1947, which means AIRAH has been issuing a publication for more than 70 years.

However, in the days of yore the publication in question was dubbed The Refrigeration Journal and the organisation that issued it went by the moniker of the Australian Institute of Refrigeration, Inc.

At 68 pages, the inaugural issue covered considerable technical ground. Featured articles covered topics as diverse as world food problems, freeze drying, thermometers and pressure gauges, ice making, refrigeration (of course), the measurement and control of pH, and frozen milk.

​Some of the standout articles were “Some Aspects of Modern Air Conditioning” by T.A. Roseby; “Bitumen and Some of Its Applications to the Refrigeration Industry” by H.E Muntz; “The Absorption Machine” by Earl Gray (a nom de plume, perhaps?); and Dr H S Bruck’s “A Nibble at Eutetics”.

The Publisher and Editor roles were both performed by DW Boulton.

Yet the honour of writing the journal’s first editorial went to an English national, London-based Joseph Raymond, the Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the Institute of Refrigeration.

“For years to come,” wrote Raymond movingly, “one supposes mankind will be sorting out the gains and losses that come to it out of the holocaust of the recent World War.”

One of the lessons to emerge from conflict of the Second World War (which concluded only three years before the journal was published) was the value of refrigeration.

“It is a pity that it takes a World War to confer such a benefit... War, like necessity, is the mother of invention, and the drive of refrigeration engineers in both Hemispheres in the late War produced refrigerating equipment that that was essential to the successful conduct of hostilities on land and sea and in the air… It preserved the very lives of our soldiers, sailors and airmen in keeping them well fed in the most far-off climes and in supplying them with blood transfusions on the most distant Fronts." – Joseph Raymond

Advertising is prominent throughout The Refrigeration Journal.
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The cover image from the inaugural issue depicts a statue of Australian refrigeration pioneer and industrialist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort.

​#010

Sydney Opera House

Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon and completed in 1973, the Sydney Opera House is not only one of the world’s most iconic structures, it’s also a building intimately associated with place. Think of Sydney, and the Opera House immediately comes to mind.

What is less well known about the strikingly original building, however, is that it has sustainability at its heart. The forward-thinking Utzon and engineer Ove Arup implemented an innovative seawater cooling system to make use of the plentiful resource on the Opera House’s doorstep.

Chillers take in cool seawater from the surrounding harbour rather than fresh water, saving 15 million litres of drinking water per year. The heat recovered from the chillers is also used for warmth in cooler weather.

More recently, a comprehensive Environmental Action Plan has been developed or the Opera House. As part of this strategy, the Sydney Opera House has committed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These provide a roadmap to address the world’s most pressing challenges – including climate change, inequality and education – by 2030.

Among the ambitious targets that have been set is achieving a 6 star Green Star Performance rating from the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA).

When the Opera House earned a 5 star Green Star rating from the GBCA last year, it was one of the first World Heritage-listed buildings to achieve this status. And having achieved carbon-neutral certification, steps are being taken for the building to become climate positive.

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​#011

The 1959 Syllabus

In 1959, syllabus cards were distributed to all members for a state-based yearly meeting. 

This version is of particular interest: it is the first time the A.I.R. logo appeared. By 1962, this logo was replaced with the more familiar one of today – including the addition of air conditioning and heating – and depicted the AIRAH brand. 

The 1959 Victorian syllabus included visits to Carlton United Breweries and Peters Ice Cream. The month of May included a presentation (the syllabus noting: “ladies are cordially invited”) and, in July, R.G. Kayler-Thomson led a delegation to the Newport Freezing Works. Kayler-Thomson is a name that has left a legacy; each year RMIT University awards a scholarship in his honour for mechanical engineering students.  
 

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​#012

Dr James Vickery OBE

AIRAH honorary life member Dr James Richard Vickery was the first recipient of the Institute’s James Harrison Award in 1972. A world authority in his field, he was the foundation chief of the CSIRO’s Division of Food Science. 

Vickery was born in Ballarat, Victoria, and graduated in science from the University of Melbourne in 1921 with majors in chemistry and physiology. His subsequent research into the effects of freezing on muscle tissue earned him a Master’s degree and a scholarship to Cambridge University. 

He completed his Doctorate of Philosophy at the Low Temperature Research Laboratory at Cambridge and was then invited by the British government to visit New Zealand as a member of a team that spent two years investigating problems associated with the freezing and transportation of New Zealand lamb. ​

Dr James Vickery, left, displays the inaugural James Harrison Medal at an AIRAH Conference dinner in 1973.

When Vickery returned to Australia in 1931, he joined the staff of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR; the forerunner to the CSIRO) to set up and direct a Food Preservation Section, with a meat research laboratory at Cannon Hill in Brisbane and a fruit research laboratory in Melbourne. In 1938, central food research laboratories were set up by CSIR at Homebush, Sydney, and Vickery was transferred from Brisbane to direct these and the branches in Brisbane and Melbourne. 

​After the outbreak of war in 1939, the section expanded rapidly and, in 1941, it became the Division of Food Preservation and Transport, with Dr Vickery as its chief. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1967. 

Vickery published numerous scientific papers, mainly relating to meat and eggs. He was also active in many national and international scientific organisations. 
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In 1967 he was made an Officer of the British Empire, as well as an honorary life member of AIRAH.

​​He died on June 13, 1997 at the age of 94.
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Vickery made notable contributions to the science and practice of refrigeration in Australia, devoting a lifetime of distinguished service. 

#013

Ania Hampton, M.AIRAH

In 2016, Ania Hampton, M.AIRAH, was elected AIRAH's 53rd President – the first woman to take on the role since the Institute was established in 1920.

Born in Poland, Hampton moved to Australia with her parents (both mechanical engineers) as a small child.

"Despite their efforts to dissuade me, engineering seemed like the best way to do something practical with my love of maths and physics," she says. ​The decision has resulted in her career as a sustainability consultant. She has run her own company, Edefice, since 2009.

Read the Q&A

#014

Sean Treweek, M.AIRAH

Originally from NSW, Sean Treweek, F.AIRAH, has made Melbourne his home for the past 13 years.

In addition to helping to guide AIRAH through the global financial crisis while serving as a board director and then National President, Treweek has held senior roles in several of Australia's leading consultancies.

Having forged a reputation as a "doer", his career progression has been rapid. Now, he is CEO for Meinhardt Australia, a multi-disciplinary engineering and professional technical services consulting firm.

Read the q&A

#015

Brett Fairweather, M.AIRAH

Based in Sydney, Brett Fairweather, M.AIRAH, is a mechanical engineering consultant for It's Engineered – a company he established in 2015 to support other practitioners throughout the HVAC&R industry.

He also works tirelessly on behalf of AIRAH in supporting the industry, and he is undoubtedly a familiar face to those that have participated in AIRAH training of late.

He is involved in a variety of industry regulation committees, too. This includes contributions to the Australian Building Code Board and Standards Australia.

Read The Q&A

#016

​Thomas Sutcliffe Mort

December 23, 1816 – May 9, 1878 

Thomas Sutcliffe Mort was an English-born, Sydney-based businessman who undertook many notable commercial ventures following his arrival to Australia in 1838. 

An entrepreneur, Mort appreciated the potential of refrigeration for the storage and transportation of perishable goods. Working with French engineer Eugene Dominique Nicolle, he financed experiments from 1866–1878 to create refrigeration machinery that could be used in trains, ships and cold-storage depots. The pair would eventually succeed in developing commercially viable systems for the New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Company. The company put these systems in place to store and transport meat and milk in the Blue Mountains, Darling Harbour, the Southern Tablelands, and in refrigerated railway vans.

For his efforts, Mort was celebrated as a benefactor for the working class. He reportedly made negligible returns on his investments, instead viewing them as a community service.

A picture of Mort’s statue – erected in Macquarie Place Park in Sydney in 1883 – was featured on the first-ever cover of AIRAH’s Refrigeration Journal, published in July 1947. Its inscription reads:  

​“A pioneer of Australian resources. A founder of Australian industries. One who established our wool market. The first to make exports of perishable food possible by refrigeration, and to provide docks for the reception of the world’s shipping. A founder of the Australian Mutual Provident Society and foremost in every moment for the care and welfare of his fellow citizen, who in gratitude erected this monument to his memory.” 

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#017

​Birth of a National Organisation

At the AIRAH Convention on October 8, 2001, delegates voted for AIRAH to evolve into a “unified, national, technical Institute” that would communicate through “a centralised system”.

This effectively moved AIRAH from being a federated body into a centralised, national organisation. Among the signatories to the agreement – which now hangs in the Harrison Hub at AIRAH’s national office in Melbourne – were a number of past and future Presidents including Ces Lommers (WA), Peter Taylor (WA), Phil Carruthers (Qld), Jon Bosci (Qld), Syd Foster (SA), Ray Clarke (Vic), and John Collins (ACT).

It reads:  

We the undersigned, being the nominated representatives at board and divisional levels, have agreed to the following organisational developments. Our evolution to a unified, national, technical institute will occur through: 

• Organisational structure 
• Communication – a centralised system which provides members with quality information and real feedback mechanisms 
• Membership – defining our potential membership; developing and delivering programmes which enable us to become the membership Institute of choice. 

​The decision was a momentous one, requiring considerable changes to AIRAH’s organisation and administration. But it created opportunities in many areas, and effectively established solid foundations for the Institute to not only survive but grow over the two decades that followed. 

#018

Photo courtesy of MONA / Leigh Carmichael

​Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)
​Hobart, Tasmania

As Australia’s largest privately funded museum, MONA is home to unconventional artworks requiring similarly unconventional HVAC design to maintain interior conditions. 

One such example is Cloaca Professional by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye – a machine that replicates the workings of the human digestive system, literally. Food goes in at one end and excrement comes out the other. The space itself is part of the experiences and was briefed to remain smelly, but the methane and other gases had to be controlled so as not to permeate the entire museum. 

The Stephen J. Shanabrook chocolate cast titled On the Road to Heaven the Highway to Hell required its own set of conditions, to protect the work from deterioration. 

General exhibition spaces are AAA-rated, a universal standard for museums and art galleries, and require tighter control of humidity and temperature, with a maintained maximum 2°C range across the painting zone. 

And all of this takes place in an open-plan building structure with little to no ceiling cavities, polished concrete floors, and limited opportunities to conceal services. Accordingly, services engineers WSP Lincolne Scott selected a displacement system as the most appropriate method of conditioning the space. 

In line with the iconoclastic nature of the museum, the combined services plant room has become part of MONA’s exhibition. 

So impressed was owner David Walsh with the visual result of the coordinated madness of the plant room that he asked for a walkway to be provided off the adjacent gallery to allow visitors to view “the guts” of the museum. 

Since opening its doors in January 2011, MONA has received millions of visitors and has been hailed for reviving the Tasmanian tourist economy. It is the second-most visited tourist attraction in the state, behind Salamanca Market. 

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#019

Clare Perry, M.AIRAH

Clare Parry is a director of Grün Consulting, a specialist high-performance buildings consultancy with projects across the globe. She was previously founding director and chair of the Australian Passive House Association. 

​Now based in Melbourne, but originally from a farming area in north-west Tasmania, Parry holds a double degree in mechanical engineering and business. With a passion for getting back to basics, she enjoys leaving the phone behind and heading out to nature with her bike in her spare time. 

Read the Q&A

#019

​ASKAP Project

Australia’s largest cooling-only geoexchange installation is used for cooling on the astonishing Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project in remote Western Australia.

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​Located 350km north-east of Geraldton in mid-west Western Australia, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) opened in 2012 at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.

The remote site was selected by the CSIRO because of the region’s low population density and lack of man-made radio signals.

ASKAP features 36 12m-diameter dish antennas that work together as a single instrument.

It is a pathfinder for the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, which aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions asked by modern astronomy and physics.

Pioneered by the CSIRO, the technology employed by ASKAP is able to survey the whole sky with unprecedented sensitivity. However, it also produces data at terabytes-a-second speed, which is then handled by onsite custom super-computers before being sent via optical fibre to CSIRO sites in Geraldton and Perth.

Such is the amount of data created by ASKAP that it is impossible to store it all. Rather, algorithms have been created to process data “on the fly”, creating final complex – but much smaller – data “cubes”.

Yet such computer power creates its own problems, including radio frequency interference (RFI) and a heat load that makes heat rejection in the forbidding environment challenging.

So how to keep everything appropriately cool at the onsite control centre?

With a peak heat load of 390kW – the majority of which is due to computing equipment – the task of rejecting this heat while maintaining a radio-quiet environment presented challenges.

And the site’s weather conditions coupled with the requirement for a radio-quiet environment all but ruled out traditional water-cooled and air-cooled plant options.

A geoexchange system designed by Aurecon with assistance from GeoExchange Australia was ultimately the preferred option, based on the advantages it offered in terms of RFI emissions and energy efficiency.

The final system comprises 96 boreholes across a field covering 45,000 sq m, each borehole measuring 125mm in diameter and drilled to a nominal depth of 124m using equipment specially shipped out from Europe for the project.
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It is thought to be Australia’s largest cooling-only geoexchange installation.

​Please check back soon as we add more faces throughout 2020.

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