Van der Hoff is Person of the Year

GERMANY: Menno van der Hoff, a key figure behind the hydrocarbon-based Triple Aqua heat pump, has been named as Person of the Year at tonight’s Accelerate Europe Awards.

The head of R&D at Beijer Ref’s Dutch subsidiary Unichemie, van der Hoff was presented with his awards at a special ceremony during this week’s Atmosphere Europe “natural” refrigerants conference in Berlin.

In making the award, Andrew Williams, editor of Accelerate Europe magazine, paid tribute to van der Hoff’s “inspirational role in raising the profile of natural refrigerants in Europe” and praised his “infectious” enthusiasm for pushing the boundaries of the technology.

A multi-award-winning product, TripleAqua uses three water pipes and can store surplus warm or cold energy internally for reuse later. It also does away with the traditional 4-way valve, operating efficiently in the optimised efficient counter-flow modes, both in cooling as well as in heating mode.

In other presentations, the Carrefour Group won the best in sector award for food retail, Nestlé won for light commercial and the Staay Food Group won the industrial category.

The Innovation of the Year award went to Viessmann for its Click4Food propane and isobutane-based cooling system.

Carrefour is phasing out HFCs and replacing them with CO2 for commercial refrigeration. The group boasts over 400 stores, around 175 of which are so far fitted with CO2 transcritical racks.

Nestlé won its award for ensuring all new ice-cream chest freezers in Europe since 2014 are HFC-free and, since 2015, worldwide. Now, starting last year, all its new island and upright freezers worldwide are HFC-free.

Kim G Christensen, managing director of Advansor, the Danish manufacturer of transcritical CO2 refrigeration systems, collected the award on behalf of the Staay Food Group. Advansor completed the installation of a transcritical system at a Dutch lettuce processing plant this year. The plant managed by the Staay Food Group has a capacity of over 3.36MW, making it the largest CO2 refrigeration project in the world.

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