"The game-changers"
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"The game-changers"
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Born in Angola, New York in 1876, Willis Carrier studied at Cornell University before graduating in 1901 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree.
When working as a young engineer on a hot summer’s evening in 1902, he was called to solve a problem at a Brooklyn print works – it was too humid for the ink to dry fast enough. Carrier’s solution would become recognised as the world’s first modern air conditioning system. The same year, Carrier discovered that constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity, which would later become known by air conditioning engineers as the “law of constant dew-point compression”. In 1911, Carrier presented one of the most significant documents ever prepared for air conditioning – Rational Psychometric Formulae – to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity and dew-point temperature. Following the start of World War I, Carrier joined with six other young engineers to form a company bearing his name. Enduring the financial and social challenges of the Great Depression, the company emerged as one of the largest employers in central New York. After World War II, the popularity of mechanical air conditioning grew across the US and globally. The International Energy Agency now predicts that by 2050 there will be 5.6 billion air conditioners in buildings around the world. |
Without doubt one of the most significant changes in the past century has been the emergence of electronics. In its various guises, electronics is the central feature of all of life today – including the HVAC&R industry.
Devices such as variable speed drives, once only a dream, are now commonplace. Monitoring via building management systems, often remotely through mobile phones, would have been unimaginable in 1920. And nowadays the direct work on air conditioning and refrigeration equipment – one mostly mechanical – is largely related to electronics. For some business operators, most of their service work is electrical failure; service vans now can hold several dozen electronic cards but not one TX valve. “It’s embarrassing to reflect on my time as a designer having a preoccupation with pneumatic controls and other mechanical devices to provide automation so replacing steam or even manual control,” says Clive Broadbent, AM, L.AIRAH. “Computers in the old days were engineers using slide rules.” |
Yet while these advances have brought undeniable gains, Broadbent notes that we have also lost some things along the way.
“We once knew what was happening with the automation,” he says. "We knew how valve sets worked in a radio and we knew how piping valves in hot- or cold-water systems open or closed from pneumatic controls and sensors. Nowadays it’s like a car wherein few people have a clue as to what’s under the bonnet. My experience, and the reasoning for entering the engineering profession, was all about what’s under the bonnet. What makes it work? How do the wheels go round? Nowadays a driver just has to know how to press a pedal – and with driverless cars maybe even that skill will be lost.” |
A college dropout from New York, Clarence Birdseye moved to Newfoundland in 1912 as a fur trapper, before being introduced to ice fishing by local Inuits.
Birdseye witnessed how caught fish instantly froze in the sub-Arctic conditions. When thawed, they looked and tasted fresh. The freezing occurred so fast and at such low temperatures that only tiny ice crystals formed. They were so small that they didn’t cause the damage to cellular structures that a slow drop in freezing did. By 1922, Birdseye had begun developing flash-freezing of fish on an industrial scale. It took three years – and left him on the brink of bankruptcy – but eventually his multi-plate freezer worked. The fresh fish was packed flat to maximum surface area, and placed in cartons that were fed onto a steel conveyer belt. The metal surface was chilled to -43°C using refrigerated brine circulating underneath. A similar system cooled the roof above the conveyor, which was pushed down onto the cartons as they passed through. While many technological advances have occurred since, the principles of the first flash-freezing system remain today. In 1924, Birdseye established General Seaford Corporation in Massachusetts. Although he sold his company and patents in 1929, his became a household name and he was even given the moniker of “Captain” despite no naval experience. |
Although big data and analytics may seem like the most modern phenomenon on this list, it can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “information explosion” was first used in 1941. Forbes magazine also notes the early projections of Wesleyan University librarian Fremont Rider, who in 1944 estimated that by 2040, the Yale Library would have approximately 200,000,000 volumes, which would occupy almost 10,000km of shelves requiring more than 6,000 cataloguing staff. By the turn of the century, however, bits and bytes were taking over from bookshelves – and data storage had become more cost-effective than paper storage. |
What has this meant for HVAC&R? Well, although the construction industry is traditionally a slow adopter of new technology, our industry has been among the fastest to utilise data, and embrace analytics and new technology.
“Root-cause analytics, machine learning and data-driven maintenance-based methods have evolved from being bleeding-edge features to now being incorporated into various business-as-usual applications,” said Scott Horsnell from Bueno in an Ecolibrium feature in 2017. “These are capable of providing earlier and much more effective and valuable outputs than anticipated.” The big challenge now is how to make best use of the data – ideally with the help of artificial intelligence. |
Born in 1963, Barbara Pratt grew up on an orchard farm outside of New York City before attending Cornell University, where she studied physics, biology, chemistry, computer sciences and mathematics.
After graduating in 1976 with a degree in physics, she eschewed postgraduate education to join Sea-Land, a shipping company founded by the inventor of shipping containers, Malcolm McLean. It led her to work in a Mobile Research Laboratory – a modified 40-foot shipping container that was part science lab, part mobile home. Pratt spent much of her 20s living inside the refrigerated shipping container, travelling the world with her colleagues, and studying the impact of transportation on fresh and frozen products. These findings led to all sorts of innovations – from reefer container design through to packing methods and customisation to achieve the particular ventilation, airflows and temperatures required to sustain the effective transportation of fresh produce. The results of Pratt’s research helped to revolutionise the reefer business and led to many advances in both the technologies and methods used to transport refrigerated goods around the world. |
The first oil crisis in 1973 – which saw the price of oil rise by nearly 400 per cent – came as a rude shock for the world’s big energy users.
Countries such as the US, Japan and the UK had never had to worry about it previously, but all of a sudden, energy efficiency became a major preoccupation. As one of the biggest users of energy in the built environment, heating and cooling came under immediate scrutiny. Early efforts to decrease energy use were focused on exhorting occupants to “switch things off” when they weren’t needed. But this soon gave way to energy monitoring and a more considered, data-driven approach, especially with the rise of computers and the introduction of BMSs. More recently, as we have become acutely aware of the need to reduce emissions, we have redoubled our efforts to save energy. As Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel has pointed out, energy efficiency is the “best form of energy generation you could possibly ever hope to have.” |
According to a recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Energy Agency, improving the efficiency of cooling equipment has the potential to more than double the climate benefits of the Kigali Amendment, with the combined potential to avoid the equivalent of up to 260 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050.
It will also save nearly US$3 trillion dollars in energy generation and transmission costs, in addition to reducing consumers’ monthly electricity bills. One of the most effective means for achieving this jump in efficiency has been the introduction of minimum energy performance standards (MEPS). Nowadays, such star ratings are instinctively understood and considered normal. |
It can be a nebulous term, and there is certainly a lot of overlap with some other entries in this list, but the concept of sustainability has undoubtedly shaped today’s HVAC&R sector and the entire built environment.
Back in 2008, Ecolibrium editor Matt Dillon interviewed Professor Bill Rees, a pioneer in the field of human ecology best known as the originator of ecological footprint analysis. “Buildings and infrastructure associated with the built environment use over one-third of the world’s energy resources, and account for 30 to 40 per cent of all the material, through waste in our landfills and so on,” he said. “It’s one of the two or three biggest areas of consumption. Because we’ve been so inefficient in this domain, there are huge opportunities to make major gains.” Many of today’s building rating systems – such as NABERS, Green Star and WELL – acknowledge the huge contribution that the built environment can make to sustainability and wellbeing, and provide a framework for measuring it. And it’s about much more than just making HVAC&R systems as efficient as possible; it encompasses everything from the refrigerants used to designing buildings to reduce the need for heating and cooling, and even looking at the expectations and behaviour of building occupants. |
Often referred to as “the world’s most successful environmental agreement”, the Montreal Protocol was a concerted response to the realisation that chemicals such as CFCs, HCFCs and halon were depleting the Earth’s ozone layer. Since its inception in 1987, all 197 UN member states have ratified the protocol – a world first for any treaty.
The sector perhaps most affected by the Montreal Protocol has been HVAC&R. “When I started in refrigeration the main refrigerants we used were, R22, R12, R502 and a bit of R500,” says Graham Boyle, F.AIRAH. “When the discussion started about phasing out CFCs, I couldn’t believe it – these were the only refrigerants I knew! That first step to transition away from CFCs was the biggest change I have seen in our industry.” |
With this change came the introduction of not just alternative refrigerants such as HFCs, but also the use of synthetic oils and refrigerant recovery units.
More recently, the realisation that many HFCs contribute significantly to global warming prompted the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Once again, the HVAC&R industry is transitioning as HFCs are phased down, and we move to alternative refrigerants such as HFOs, CO2, hydrocarbons and ammonia. All of this means new equipment, as well as new skills for those designing and working with that equipment. |
Over the past century, we have become an increasingly indoor species. It is now estimated that Australians spend 90 per cent of their day indoors.
Naturally, we have begun to take more notice of the air we breathe inside our buildings – whether that be the home or the workplace. And there is indeed cause for concern: Indoor air pollution is consistently ranked among the top five environmental risks to public health by the US EPA and its Science Advisory Board. Problems include introduced gases from cooking, as well as volatile organic compounds from painted surfaces and furniture, not to mention organic pollutants such as fungi and microbial contamination. A new generation of professionals are now questioning the primacy of aesthetics in our built environment. “Architecture and aesthetics are very important,” says building physicist Marcela Brauner. “But the main purpose of a house is a shelter for people. It needs to serve the occupants, to support the people to have a good rest after work. But how can people have a good rest when you have mould spores and you breathe it every night? After a year that has already seen intense bushfires in Australia and a global pandemic, our focus on indoor air quality is only going to intensify. This will have huge ramifications for our industry, especially those working in building physics, ventilation and air filtration and purification. |
Living in a developed country, it is all too easy to take our HVC&R systems for granted. According to a recent report from Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), more than a billion of the world’s rural and urban poor still lack access to cooling, threatening their immediate health and safety.
Born in Nigeria, Mohammed Bah Abba was a teacher who hailed from a family of pot makers. He found worldwide fame in 2001 with his Pot-in-Pot cooling system. This simple refrigerator keeps food cool in the desert, where it usually perishes quickly, depriving farmers of much needed income. The invention was inspired by the ancient Arabian zeer. It uses earthenware pots and evaporative cooling. |
Fresh food is placed inside a watertight ceramic pot, which is housed within a larger unglazed pot. The space between the two pots is then filled with damp river sand and the pots covered. As the water in the sand evaporates in the desert air, heat from the contents of the inner pot is drawn away to keep the contents cool.
In 2001, Bah Abba received the Rolex Award for Enterprise and used the US$75,000 award to established numerous pot factories using traditional, pottery techniques. The same year, his invention was named as one of the Inventions of the Year by Time magazine. By 2005, Bah Abba distributed nearly 100,000 Pot-in-Pot systems across Nigeria as well as parts of Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Niger and Sudan. In 2008, an adaption of the concept was used in Guinea by humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation Doctors Without Borders to store antimalarial drugs for children. |
For more on James Harrison – AIRAH's guiding light and the pioneer of refrigeration – click here. |
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