£4m grant for Adande Aircell technology
21st October 2015
UK: Adande has announced a further £4m investment in its Aircell airflow management system for open-fronted multideck refrigerated cabinets.
The investment will be funded by equity finance and a £2.1m Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) grant. Adande says it will allow the company and its consortium partners, including refrigerated cabinet manufacturer, the Bond Group, to take the technology to new levels and meet retailers’ specific merchandising requirements in the UK and abroad.
Adande is committing over £500,000 to the construction of three state-of-the-art refrigeration system test rooms at its Lowestoft headquarters. This will allow testing to ISO23953 as well as providing the resources to meet and exceed the terms of new test standards scheduled for introduction in 2017.
The new test facilities will incorporate the latest design features, including a single control system to regulate humidity, temperature and fan speed within the chambers. The test rooms will have accurate temperature control, through an extended range of 15oC to 43oC, regulated via a user friendly touch screen controller.
The test rooms will be energy efficient and have a minimal carbon footprint achieved through a range of features, including active bypass dehumidification, Eurovent energy efficient class A air handlers, air source heat pump EC fans and LED lighting.
In addition to the establishment of the research, development and test chambers, Adande says it will be creating a dedicated facility, housing CAD resources and a sophisticated computational fluid dynamics’ suite, for the numerical analysis of complex issues, relating to fluid flows and simulation scenarios such as turbulent flows.
Adande md Ian Wood believes that the company has achieved a breakthrough in delivering game changing retail technology. “Aircell has been successfully tested under independent laboratory conditions and a pre-production model has undergone live trials within a Tesco store in Lincoln,” he said. “The technology will be commercially available from the Bond Group in the near future. Our investment plans and the AMSCI grant will enable us to accelerate the development of the technology to meet the requirements of retailers and original equipment manufacturers, at home and abroad.”
Adande’s earlier development, a patented insulated drawer system, will also benefit from the investment. “In addition to our investment in Aircell, we are also committing equity funds to develop further global growth for our drawer products,” said Adande chairman Nigel Bell.
