The ACES demo hall – a new state-of-the-art flexible facility to support clean cooling uptake across Africa

Co.authored by Dr. Ed Hammond, 
London South Bank University

Recent By Degrees articles and Clean Cooling Network (CCN) news stories have outlined several of the facilities available at the Rubirizi, Kigali campus of the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES). 

Here we describe in detail the demo (or demonstration) hall, a key component underpinning our support of clean cooling adoption in Rwanda and across the African continent.

Demonstration Hall

With a 30 x 20 meter footprint and 6-8 meters of height, the demo hall is a big flexible space where a diverse range of cooling and cold-chain equipment can be installed, tested, developed and showcased. It has large access doors, a switch gear room and 2 plant rooms (to accommodate equipment support plant), and a forklift available for unloading and positioning as required.

Within the hall are some permanent items, an environmental room, three controlled atmosphere rooms, a chiller and a storage freezer, which will be instrumental in the testing, proving, and demonstration of many of the pieces of equipment that are bought into the facility. The large open plan area between these fixed items provides an excellent space for the temporary residents, as well as the holding of exhibitions, hands-on training, and public demonstrations of new clean cooling technologies of relevance to Africa. Overall, the hall is designed to be extremely flexible with the ability to connect equipment to electricity or water supplies at any point throughout the space. And of-course, data is key when analysing new technologies and processes, so the facility is fully equipped with a wide range of data logging and monitoring systems that can be used to analyse the performance of the equipment being tested or demonstrated.

The largest permanent item in the demo hall is the environmental room. This is a highly versatile piece of equipment capable of creating an operating environment of 16°C to 50°C with a relative humidity ranging from 40% to 80% and accurately controlled lighting levels and air flow. It has been specifically designed to test and develop retail, professional (catering) and domestic refrigerators to international standards, and its prime purpose is to ensure compliance with energy and temperature requirements (e.g. minimum energy performance standards, energy labels etc.). Tests undertaken in this facility provide governments, end users and manufacturers with independent assurance that the item they are procuring or using complies with relevant regulations. Additionally, though, the room can be used for the development of equipment, particularly to improve performance or for operational simulation in a controlled environment prior to deployment in the field.

The three smaller controlled atmosphere rooms are intended to test the storage life of horticultural products under different atmospheric conditions (controlling the atmosphere around fruits and vegetables can have a significant impact on the rate at which they perish). The facility gives the ACES team the capability to test a range of temperature regimes, new gases, conventional controlled atmosphere conditions, or new products and packaging combinations.

Why use the demo hall?

By accessing the demo hall, companies can test new processes, see how they might integrate into their current processing lines, or identify whether they could have beneficial impacts on food quality. They can explore further commercialisation of a product/process if they wish to expand production, scale up, or automate a cooling process, as well as showcase new equipment and technologies. And in the case of new food products, the hall will be linked to the ACES’s co-located community cooling hub (CCH), which will have a demo kitchen that can be used for development, testing, and demonstration. The demo hall and its capabilities will be on display during the forthcoming Festival of Cooling, being held on the Rubirizi campus of ACES over the period of 6th -10th October. 

Please do book a place, come along, explore the space, and discuss with us any ideas you might have for its use - we are sure there will be many we haven’t thought of yet! [email protected]