The year 2025 has been an exciting period of achievement for the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) on the technologies front, with the accelerated installation of refrigeration equipment enabling us to demonstrate systems, train more people, and provide the services needed to help develop refrigeration markets across Africa.
Most notably, we started 2025 with a brand new but empty demo and test hall on our Kigali campus site and are now closing it with an impressive range of equipment installed, contributing to our technology base.
Key equipment in this superb test, demonstration and teaching space includes an environmental test chamber and three temperature controlled environmental rooms, all of which use natural refrigerants in their cooling systems.
The chamber, a first-of-a-kind for Africa, has been designed for testing retail, professional (catering) and domestic refrigerators over a wide range of conditions against international standards as well as to support local manufacturers in product development. The smaller rooms will prove invaluable to assess storage conditions for produce under a variety of temperature and atmospheric conditions.
Beyond these major landmark facilities, a range of core equipment has arrived on the campus site to demonstrate a variety of refrigeration systems. These include transport systems for food, such as thermal boxes, containers and transport pods utilising eutectic packs for cooling, two solar powered Koolboks freezers with thermal energy storage (ice battery), and other off-grid chilled systems. A dedicated eutectic pack freezer has been provided and we also have an absorption chiller and a solar powered trailer body. Additionally, early in 2025 we took delivery of a transport training rig (donated by Carrier) to aid teaching focussed on operation, control and telemetry systems.
The Refrigeration Training Centre (RTC) has also been completed this year and is now in use training technicians. This fully equipped centre enables all aspects of refrigeration system operation to be covered, from brazing to refrigerant reclaim (capabilities for charging and recovery have been installed and are operational). As part of the RTC’s facilities, state-of-the-art training rigs have been provided that enable real world equipment faults to be simulated (for accelerating the acquisition of practice experience normally obtained from years of working in-the-field), training on solar powered refrigeration to take place, and trainees to better understand how different refrigeration systems operate. The latter includes direct expansion systems used in commercial and small industrial systems, air conditioning units and transport systems.
Work on establishing the world’s first Community Cooling Hub (CCH) in Africa has begun. This exciting realisation of a central Clean Cooling Network (CCN) concept will be used for training, developing added value products, and demonstrating to rural communities what can be achieved if consumer needs are considered and integrated into a local cooling hub. The CCH, scheduled for completion in 2026, will have a range of food processing equipment installed. This will be available to demonstrate how the facility can support the development of value-added products that enable farmers, fishers, and their local communities to realise new business opportunities for revenue generation and economic growth.
Finally, it what might appear in comparison to be a relatively minor technological step, we have begun a retrofit of a small-scale milk chiller from R404A to R290. This work, which aims to demonstrate a reduction in the environmental impact of these units, is however a significant task involving careful consideration of safety aspects and the solving of complicated technical challenges. It will continue into 2026 with the goal of delivering a safe, replicable design that can be manufactured locally.
The Festival of Cooling hosted by ACES in October gave us an opportunity to show off all of these exciting new installations in a choregraphed event that bought farmers, school students, medical sector practitioners and logistics teams, refrigeration technicians, entrepreneurs, innovators, policymakers and the public to the Kigali campus. A world first, the 5-day festival composed of equipment demonstrations, talks, hands-on practical experiences, competitions and fun-filled happenings, celebrated cooling and transformed it into a visible, engaging, and inclusive conversation, with clear educational and awareness-raising impact. The success of the latter is still evident in the fact that schools continue to reach out to us to organise more visits to ACES.
With the Centre and SPOKE programme in full swing, in Kenya we have received, commissioned and now have operating two try before you buy facilities. These are designed to provide farmers and communities with initial access to refrigeration and cooling systems to test how they would use them. This gives them the ability to try out cooling and how it would work for their particular situation before having to invest any funds themselves. The facilities are already proving effective in allowing users to extend product shelf lives and achieve higher sales prices for produce.
And by the way in India, we have continued supporting the team to develop a mini centre of excellence which will be operation in 2026. We are also providing ongoing support for the design of a larger centre of excellence which will encompass testing facilities, a large demonstration hall, training facilities as well as providing support for developing businesses.
Looking ahead to 2026, technology priorities include fully equipping and commissioning the CCH, continued support for the teams in Kenya and India, as well as building on our installed equipment base to offer testing services to clients and expand ACES’s training provision, including the development of refrigeration modules for the ACES MSc in Clean Cooling. We will also be making the 2026 Festival of Cooling even more engaging by applying the lessons learnt from the 2025 event. It’s certainly going to be another exciting year ahead for the technology team at ACES!
Prof. Judith Evans, Professor of Refrigeration Engineering at London South Bank University (LSBU), Senior Advisor, ACES