JSRAE president Momoki Katakura and ASHRAE president Gordon Holness sign the memorandum of understanding as members from both associations look on.

ATLANTA - The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the Japan Society of Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (JSRAE) recently made a commitment to collaborate and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU).

The MOU was signed in May at ASHRAE’s headquarters in Atlanta. The two groups agreed to advance and promote the mutual interests of engineering and built environment professionals. ASHRAE currently has 157 members in Japan.

“Working with JSRAE allows ASHRAE to expand its reach into countries that can contribute to and benefit from the technology and information sharing in the society,” said Gordon Holness, now past ASHRAE president. “This will help in creating a worldwide best practices data bank of innovative and successful technologies that can serve the HVACR community.”

“It brings me much pleasure that ASHRAE and JSRAE have reached an agreement to explore collaboration on advanced refrigerant management along with other important HVACR issues,” said Momoki Katakura, JSRAE president. “This MOU will surely stand as a monumental event in the history of both of our organizations. I sincerely hope that both organizations will continue to play a leading global role through innovative and inspiring mutual consultation geared toward positive solutions to the problems facing us.”

JSRAE is currently building an industry infrastructure for refrigerant tracking and management that it hopes will eventually be adopted into law in Japan. ASHRAE is tracking this JSRAE initiative very closely. JSRAE representatives are interested in the ongoing development of ASHRAE Standard 147, Reducing the Release of Halogenated Refrigerants from Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Equipment and Systems, which is closely related to the refrigerant management issue. Standard 147 is currently under revision.

Other items discussed at the MOU signing included establishing liaisons within each organization’s technical committee structure as a means for collaborating in research, standards development, etc., and sending speakers to each other’s annual conferences.

Publication date:07/26/2010