Awardees 2008

The three awardees of the 2008 Peter Ritter von Rittinger Award are:

• Professor Eric Granryd from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden
• Professor Predrag S. Hrnjak from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US
• M.Sc. Gerald C. Groff of Cazenovia, New York, US

 Eric Granryd has served as Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1984 until 1999 at the Department of Applied Thermodynamics and Refrigeration. He has also worked internationally in a series of different commissions, for example within the International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR).

Professor Granryd's most outstanding contributions to research and development of heat pumping technologies are his calculation method for air coils and optimization of heat pump systems. The calculation method has been widely used by the industry, especially for further improvements in the heat transfer on the air side.

 Predrag S. Hrnjak obtained his Master’s degree and Doctorate at the University of Belgrade. In 1992 he joined the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has served as codirector since 2001.

“Pega”, as he is known to colleagues throughout the world, was chosen to lead a multi-year programme to compare alternative refrigerants by a consortium bringing together all main global automobile manufacturing and supplying companies.

 M.Sc. Gerald C. Groff was awarded advanced degrees in Mechanical Engineering and has written more than 50 technical papers, articles and reports on air conditioning, building energy systems and office workstation ergonomics.

Mr Groff has had several industrial positions, among other things President of Marquardt Switches, Director of Carrier’s Corporate Research Laboratories and Director of Solar Heat Research at the U.S. Solar Energy Research Laboratory (NREL).