"The partnership with Smardt in North America and with PowerPax in the West Pacific means we can now serve and support our major international customers with the same standards and the same energy efficiencies and the same reliability they insist on in Europe," said Dr. Martin Altenbokum, CEO of Axima Refrigeration. "Together with Smardt and PowerPax we clearly have more engineering and field experience with oil-free chillers than anyone else in the world. We mean to consolidate and reinforce that lead as one of the world's pre-eminent chiller groups.

"Turbocor oil-free compressor technology is an important element of Axima Refrigeration's know-how surrounding industrial cooling systems and solutions," said Altenbokum. The oil-free compressor technology was pioneered in Australia, and then developed in Canada by Turbocor Inc., led for its first 10 years by president and CEO Roger Richmond-Smith. "Our PowerPax and Smardt units include many key members of the original Turbocor team," said Richmond-Smith. "Not surprisingly, our group's oil-free centrifugal chillers deliver the best efficiencies and the lowest lifetime operating costs in the industry."

The new group will continue to use the Axima, Smardt, and PowerPax brands. The group will also be used for joint engineering development and to take advantage of procurement opportunities and economies of scale. Some development facilities will be shared. "The group function enables us to shorten time to market for new chillers and to fully exploit our new developments in controls, monitoring and heat exchanger design," said Altenbokum. "This means lower operating costs for our end user, the customer - in water cooled chillers from 60TR to 900TR and air cooled chillers from 60TR up to 300TR and onwards."

Publication date: 02/06/2006