Recipient: Mr Pat J Boner, P J Boner & Company
Nominated by:
Mr. Patrick M Boner, P J Boner & Company
Mr. Eoin O’Riain, Read-out Publications

Pat J Boner with family members and President John Downey and Deputy Lord mayor Fitzgerald

Pat J Boner has been actively involved in Instrumentation and Automation all his working life, Pat was born in Dungloe, Co Donegal before moving to Edinburgh, Scotland at the age of 12, after completing his school education, he began an Electrical apprenticeship working with the Scottish National Coal Board. Pat excelled in his early years and was selected to move to the Instrumentation Apprenticeship after his first year. In this year he was selected to represent Scotland in the National Apprenticeship awards. Soon after completing this apprenticeship he moved to Birmingham, England to take up employment with ICI in the metals division as an Instrument Technician, within 6 months he was promoted to Shift Instrument Artificer age 23. Pat then worked with GKN Forge & Press Works before being offered a job with Honeywell, which would involve moving to Dublin to take up an employment opportunity as a Service Engineer covering all 32 counties.

After 4 years with Honeywell, he joined GEC Elliott in 1974 as Area Manager for GEC Elliott for both Sales & Service in Ireland.

Pat Boner acknowledges receipt of his award.

In 1978 Pat founded P.J. Boner & Company to provide a quality Instrumentation Service along with the supply of Instrumentation & Weighing Goods from International manufacturers to the Irish market. The company started from Pat’s house in South Dublin, starting with just three employees working from the front room before moving to a much larger premises in 1983, and with it additional employees including Instrument Technicians, Panel Builders, Apprentices and Administration staff.

From its foundation, P J Boner & Company started working with many of Irelands most prestigious companies with quality being at the forefront of every job undertaken and completed. Pats expert knowledge of Instrumentation and weighing was a primary factor in the initial development of contracts with some of Ireland’s best known companies, some of these contracts that are still standing to this day, 33 years later. By the late 1980’s Pat had seen a market for the automation of batching systems in Ireland and began programming, installing and commissioning some of Irelands most complicated, accurate and fast systems for concrete, feed & process.

Through this time and up until present day, P J Boner & Company employed staff in the
Instrumentation, Weighing and Automation fields, all interviewed, inducted and guided
by Pat in the development of their trades and up to the high standards that are expected by
all at P J Boner’s which has been instilled through Pats years as Managing Director.
Pat retired from day to day management in 2009 after working in the Instrumentation
Industry for 50 Years, with 31 of those years involved running one of Ireland’s most
successful instrumentation companies and giving employment to hundreds of Technicians
down through the years. He has taken up the role of Company Chairman to assist with the
continuing success of the business. Pat has been a member of the ISA for 34 years and
was present at the initial founding of the ISA Ireland section in 1977.

Recipient: Ms. Romania Dirimanova
Nominated by: Mr. Declan Lordan, Douglas Automation
Mr. Peadar Walsh, Jones Group

Romania Dirimanova with President John Downey, Lord Mayor Fitzgerald and members of the development team from Siemens & Iarnród Éireann.

Iarnród Éireann through a large team in the New Works Control Section have developed an automation system which interfaces with 25 year old technology and gives the benefits of current day technology to the Code Signaling System across Irelands railway system.

Since 1984 one of the most important signaling systems in Irish Rail providing safety for
the railway traffic has been the Continuous Automatic Warning System (CAWS) and Automated Train Protection (ATP). The purpose of the system is to assure that the train
drivers obey line side signals and speed restrictions.

Since 2003 Iarnród Éireann have been in the process of modernisation under the National
Development Plan encompassing a 20 year strategy framework for the railway. The
methods and equipment for Train Control used on Iarnród Éireann rail network were
examined with a view to invest in a project aimed at replacing and enhancing the legacy
track side and onboard Train Control subsystems. As part of the implementation of the
National Development Plan a new modern Code Generating System aimed to replace the
existing obsolete track side Train Control coding equipment was designed by Iarnród
Éireann specialists. This system is based on contemporary traffic management
technologies and is expected to satisfy today’s and future demands and needs of Iarnród
Éireann.

The benefits which Iarnród Éireann have received because of this new system include a
significant improvement in the reliability of the system by removing all
electromechanically based elements, a reduction in design and testing time by up to 5
times, the flexibility to interface different signaling safety systems, achieve
maintainability through diagnostics and technical support, provide cost effectiveness in all
stages of design, installation, and maintenance; with a reduction to 1/25th the previous
time taken to test a section of track.

The technology also brought the following benefits – the system achieved the Highest
Safety performance – Safety Integrity Level 4 rating; facilitated most of the testing
process to take place in an office environment; and facilitated the transition process to
minimise disruptions to railway traffic as the new system could work in parallel with the
old existing system.

A large project team was required to work in close co-operation during the development,
testing, installation, validation, operation, training and documentation. The system is fully
transparent to the existing on-board equipment and can be easily deployed on newly built
track sections, or onto the existing Iarnród Éireann main lines equipped with coded track
circuits. The proposed designed for use in Iarnród Éireann, is a high performance track
side code-generating system intended for coding of the track circuits on company lines
where Continuous Automatic Warning System (CAWS) and Automated Train Protection
(ATP) onboard equipped traction units are operated.

The equipment uses information inputs from telegrams circulating over SSI trackside data
lines (TDLs). From these telegrams the information related with the signal aspects,
position of the points and status of the track circuits is extracted, safely processed and
used as a base for producing the corresponding codes required for the operation of the
Train Control systems. The new code generating system does not change the method of
the operation of the existing Train Control equipment installed on-board of the traction
units operated by Iarnród Éireann.

The implementation of the system is a successful demonstration of how using units with
lower SIL a system with higher SIL can be developed because of the requirements applied
and methodology followed during the development process. Because of the modularity
and flexibility of the system, it can be easily expanded when requirements increase. The
inherent information capacity is very big and permits exchange of great volumes of data
between the different levels of the system.

Recipient: Mr. Pietro Zucca, College Green, Dublin 2, (Sardinia, Italy)
Nominated by: Prof. Peter T. Gallagher, School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin

Pietro Zucca receives his order from Deputy Lord Mayor Fitzgerald flanked by President John Downey.

Mr. Pietro Zucca is a PhD student in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) supervised by Prof. Peter T. Gallagher of the School of Physics and Prof. Linda Doyle of the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering. The aim of his PhD is to understand the effect of the Sun on telecommunications systems in Ireland and further afield. In order to do this, he has been responsible for setting up and testing a remotely controllable radio spectrometer to observe the Sun at radio frequencies in the range 10-400 MHz.

The radio spectrometer was set up at TCD’s Rosse Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (RSTO), which was established at Birr Castle, Co. Offaly, Ireland in September 2010. Mr. Zucca has led the installation of the three Compound Astronomical Low-Cost Low Frequency (Callisto) spectrometers and the associated antennas and control systems. The receivers are fed simultaneously by a bicone and a log-periodic antenna. Nominally, frequency spectra in the range 10-400 MHz are obtained with 4 sweeps per second over 600 channels. The system has now been fully tested and allows scientists in Dublin to remotely control the operations of the antennas at the RSTO. Once data is obtained at the site, it is automatically made available to the international science community via the
RSTO website.

Mr. Zucca’s primary contribution was to design the antenna mounts and the motorized antenna motor. The motor, thanks to specifically designed tracking software, is able to point the radio antennas to the Sun, tracking its motion during the day. Then, the radio spectrograph records the solar emission and automatically delivers the data to the website. Mr. Zucca had an important role in the development of the observatory hardware, the observatory website, and has recently submitted a paper to Solar Physics gives a complete description of the instrumentation at Birr.

In just over a year since starting his PhD project, Mr. Zucca has made an important contribution to the development and testing of the radio spectrometers at RSTO. Indeed, his expertise in instrumentation, control, and remote operations has been essential to the success of the project.

Recipient: Ms. Jennifer Gaughran, School of Physical Sciences, Dublin City University
Nominated by: Dr. Enda McGlynn & Prof. Jens Ducrée School of Physical Sciences & Biomedical Diagnostics Institute (BDI), Dublin City University (DCU)

Jennifer Gaughran with her parents and ISA Ireland President John Downey and Lord Mayor of Cork Tony Fitzgerald

Ms. Jennifer Gaughran has recently graduated from the B.Sc. in Physics with Astronomy, degree programme. This nomination is based primarily on Jennifer’s outstanding 4th year project work entitled “Centrifugo-Pneumatic Valving using Dissolvable Films”, which is an excellent example of the application of physics in the development of cutting edge automation of applications in biomedical diagnostics and the life sciences. For this project work Jennifer had to utilize her core physics knowledge and abilities in the research intensive environment of the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute (BDI), an industrially focused SFI-funded Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) based at DCU. The project developed instrumentation for the key element of flow control in microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems.

Jennifer significantly improved the instrumentation and automation for centrifugal microfluidic “lab-on-a-disc” technologies which are well-known for their superb capability of liquid sample preparation and detection. With a concept adopted from optical disc drives such as CD-, DVD- or Blu-ray-players, a conceptually simple instrument essentially comprising of a reusable unit with a spindle motor and an optical detection unit called “pick-up” spins a microstructured disc. Instead of optically stored data represented by submicron-sized features (“pits and lands”), the microfluidic disc contains a network featuring cavities and interconnects representing reservoirs for loading sample fluids and reagents, transport channels and detection chambers for bioassays. The objective is to devise fully automated sample-to-answer instruments which take up for example, a patient’s blood sample, and precondition and analyze it, to provide a diagnostic result on the disease state of a patient at the point-of-care.

Because they determine key performance factors such as metering precision and flow control for automated and quantitative bioassays, valving structures are of paramount importance for such versatile lab-on-a-disc technologies. In this context, Jennifer has pioneered a completely novel, centrifugo-pneumatic valving principle which has by now become a core element of several microfluidic platforms developed with the industrial partners of the BDI. By means of these novel dissolvable films valves, Jennifer’s work could significantly facilitate the instrumentation and optimize the performance of highly automated bioassays on the lab-on-a-disc platform. For the first time, these dissolvable films valves could reliably control sample preparation (blood filtration, metering and mixing) as well as the release of on-board stored liquid reagents to demonstrate highly integrated, multi-step biological immunoassays on an instrument derived from a CD player.

* Ger Dullea was President of the Ireland Section of ISA in 1991/92 who died tragically in early 1993. RIP.  This bursury was instituted shortly afterwards in his memory!

Mark Casey receiving his award from Deputy Lord Mayor Fitzgerald with ISA Ireland President John Downey on left!

Mark Casey completed the three year full-time B.Sc. in applied Physics and Instrumentation in June 2011 at Cork Institute of Technology and was first in class with a final year average mark of 76.8% and an award classification of Pass with Distinction. In
two of his final year modules, Industrial Automation & SCADA and Programming for Measurement applications, Mark received outstanding marks of 98% and 97% respectively. Looking back at his earlier results, it is interesting to note that Mark obtained impressive marks of 92% in Industrial Automation during second year and 91% in Technological Mathematics in his first year.

Marks industrial placement during his final year was at Conoco Phillips in Whitegate where he obtained a first class mark of 78%. Mark is now studying for his B.Sc. Honours in Applied Physics at Cork Institute of Technology.

Mark has consistently demonstrated the highest level of academic achievement during his course. He is an excellent, hard-working student

Seated from left: Section President John Downey, Deputy Lord Mayor of Cork, Councillor Tony Fitzgerald, Awardee André Michel. At Back, Billy Walsh and Eoin Ó Riain ISA Executive Board Members, Awardee's Daughter, Kevin Wilhem, Director ISA Pubs, Awardees Wife, Brian Curtis, Honours & Awards Committee.

Criteria:
This award was established to give Society-wide recognition to members with no more than ten (10) years of accumulated membership, whose accomplishments and responsibilities has contributed significantly to the Society and its organizational units.
Unlike the Section awards, this award is being presented by the Ireland Section on behalf of the wider ISA Society.

Recipient: Mr Andre Michel, Skilpad, Quebec, Canada.
Nominated by: Mr. Dave Adler, ISA Indianapolis Section and VP-Elect Publications Department

Andre has 25 years of successful automation project delivery in a wide variety of industries and projects. Andre has been a member of ISA since 2001 and has been active at the Section, District, Division and Society level of the ISA. Andre is currently the President-Elect of the ISA Montreal Section, where he has held roles of Secretary and Professional Development Chair. In these roles Andre has developed partnerships with REAI (the organization of Automation Manufacturers in Quebec) and RVA (Rendez Vous of Automation).

At a District level (District 12) Andre has held the role of Leadership Development Chair and participated and presented at the 2011 District Leadership Conference in Toronto and 2010 District Leadership Conference in Montreal. Within the Food and Pharmaceutical Division (FPID) of ISA, Andre has been very active helping to develop and roll out aprogram of web-based seminars on Pharmaceutical Automation while also being the Newsletter Editor for the last 4 years.

At a Society level Andre has been an information member of the ISA106 standards committee on Procedural Automation for Continuous Process Operations, which addresses topics such as physical, procedural and application models, lifecycle management best practices, and training and certification best practices. Andre has also been involved in the ISA Expo and Automation Week events as session and track organiser for Human Asset Optimization and Process Automation for the last four years.

HMS Industrial Networks presented a number of solutions targeting energy management in automation systems. Recent research from the AIDA group of German automobile manufacturers (Audi, BMW, Daimler, Porsche, VW) and the Profibus User Organization shows that industrial networks play a major role in the implementation of control strategies for energy optimization on the plant floor.

Embedded modules with energy profile support
As one of the leading manufacturers of industrial networking solutions, HMS has already introduced PROFIenergy-conformant Anybus embedded communication modules. Support for further energy management profiles will follow as soon as they become stable and widely accepted.

Gateways enable instant energy control
HMS has identified that it may take some time until the latest energy management standards will be used plant-wide. In the meantime, HMS offers a wide range of solutions mainly targeted at system integrators and end users. These solutions enable the integration of standard automation equipment into modern fieldbus or industrial Ethernet communication systems, increasing the level of automation, system efficiency and energy management.

With the Anybus Communicator series of intelligent protocol converters, system integrators and end users are able to integrate existing automation equipment via standard serial RS-232 or Modbus-RTU interfaces into modern industrial fieldbus or Ethernet networks. Anybus X-gateways provide the same values interconnecting different networks. Both gateway families enable a transparent flow of information throughout the entire plant including the ability to switch off automation equipment during production breaks and standstill periods in a synchronized manner, adding to the total energy management and plant efficiency. A good example is the integration of standard circuit breakers — that are typically not network-enabled — into modern industrial networks.

Remote management adds further green effects
Their Netbiter solution for M2M remote management allows users to get an overview of their applications’ energy consumption. The innovative Netbiter product line was recently awarded the Swedish E-prize 2011 within an application created by Jeff Electronics. The E-prize is awarded to companies that combine energy, efficiency and economics to reduce cost, minimize the environmental effect and also increase competitiveness.

“Our green automation initiative will help businesses save energy and reduce their carbon footprint, while improving productivity and profits” commented Staffan Dahlström, CEO at HMS Industrial Networks AB.

In addition, they announced a partnership with Wurldtech, a leading provider of cyber-security testing and certification solutions for critical industries, such as process automation, power and energy, oil and gas, and transportation. Wurldtech’s Achilles certification directly addresses cyber-security at a time when accessible, affordable, high-speed connectivity has created increased vulnerability to malicious cyber-attacks and Wind River is the first operating system vendor to be designated a Wurldtech Achilles Communications Certification. Through this collaboration, Wind River is able to act as a Wurldtech Achilles Communications Certification partner, testing and certifying the complete customer-deployed system as customers build mission-critical systems on top of its Achilles-certified VxWorks platform.

On day two, they continued our announcements with news that Comau Robotics, one of the worldwide leading manufacturers of high quality industrial robots, is running Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) for its C5G system, the latest generation of its Robot Control Unit. The unit runs peripherals control software, application software and real-time functions on an advanced multi-core architecture. VxWorks delivered the levels of performance, reliability, safety, and security required for this next-generation unit.

Security and safety are the driving forces behind these announcements. Security and safety issues will continue to face the automation space. Wind River, along with its strategic partners, is able to continue to face security and safety challenges head on. I had the chance to interview several partners and customers while at the show. In my next blog, I’ll share feedback on how industry leaders are preparing for the changing landscape of the automation market.

They highlighted how its Cyclone® series of FPGAs enables integrated, high-performance industrial systems such as drive systems with a high-performance control loop in floating point. Visitors to the booth also can test drive the industry’s first Virtual Target for software development on the new Cyclone V SoC FPGA with the integrated ARM® Cortex(TM)-A9 MPCore(TM) processor. Many designers use Cyclone FPGAs in a wide range of industrial applications including drives, PLCs, inverters and embedded control.

Demonstrations included:

• “Drive-on-a-chip” solution through model-based design
• Leveraging the FPGA industry’s first variable-precision DSP architecture, Altera tools such as DSP Builder and Qsys take advantage of floating-point algorithms implemented in MathWorks Simulink to reduce control loop latency and extend intellectual property (IP) reuse
• Building a drive on a single device by integrating the motor control algorithm, logic, encoder interface and Industrial Ethernet protocols
  o Using EBV Elektronik’s FalconEye FPGA system with a brushless motor to deliver a flexible hardware reference platform that significantly reduces development time
• Support for multiple industrial networking protocols on a single device
• The Industrial Networking Kit (INK), featuring the Cyclone IV E FPGA, expands support for the leading Industrial Ethernet protocols on a single FPGA
• Integrated FPGA control for 3-level IGBTs
• A hardware reference system highlighting an efficient method for 3-level space-vector modulation for inverters and high-frequency drives
• The latest in 3-level insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) with smaller output voltage steps that reduce potential issues with long power cables between the inverter and motor
• New software development tool for ARM-Based SoC FPGAs
• FPGA industry’s first Virtual Target for software development on SoC FPGAs designed to enable immediate device-specific embedded software development
• PC-based functional simulation of embedded development board for Cyclone V and Arria® V SoC FPGA devices
• Binary- and register-compatible, functional equivalent of SoC FPGA board ensures that software developed on the Virtual Target can be moved to the actual board with minimal effort

Emerson Process Management has achieved significant milestones in driving the adoption of wireless technologies in refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities around the world. With 580 million total hours of wireless operation across 6,100 networks, Emerson Smart Wireless solutions have gained widespread adoption as they deliver proven performance while addressing critical business challenges.

Their wireless technologies have enabled industrial customers to monitor processes in places where wired connections are impractical or where humans shouldn’t go. Emerson, the largest provider of wireless solutions based on the internationally recognised IEC 62591 (WirelessHART^®) standard, delivers wireless communications for highly complex operations, including process automation, emissions controls, maintenance, and worker safety – and, in many cases, in very challenging and extreme environments.

“We’ve focused on wireless innovation to enable industrial efficiency in the toughest environments, from monitoring oil pipelines on the North Slope of Alaska, where wind chill temperatures are minus 56 degrees Celsius, or in the desert, where temperatures rise to over 40 degrees Celsius, with sandstorms and even the gnawing jaws of camels damaging wired connections,” said Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management. “We’re seeing tremendous growth in our Smart Wireless solutions, as thousands of industrial customers realise the unique benefits and broad potential of wireless communications to improve operations, enhance safety and reduce environmental risks.”

IMS Research reports that worldwide shipments of industrial products that are wireless-enabled are set to grow from an estimated 1.2 million in 2009 to more than 3 million in 2015, at an average annual growth rate of 18 per cent. Since WirelessHART was approved in 2010 as the first international wireless communication standard, it has been validated and accepted globally by industry.

The majority of industrial wireless users rely on these devices to extend the plant information network with additional sensors, streamline maintenance and improve worker safety.  Future Smart Wireless products from Emerson will extend customers’ capabilities from monitoring to control functions, enabling customers to not only gather critical information but also to act on it remotely. Emerson will also extend wireless to new applications that historically have relied only on manual observation and periodic reporting, giving industrial customers real-time, constant visibility to new and better data for improved control systems, safety systems, asset management, machinery health and overall plant performance.

Emerson offers a wide range of wireless field instrumentation and plant operations equipment, including Fisher^® position monitors, Rosemount^® transmitters, and Rosemount Analytical and Machinery Health Management devices. Other components of an Emerson Smart Wireless solution include AMS Suite predictive maintenance software, DeltaV™ digital automation systems and wireless SmartStart™ Services. Smart Wireless is an extension of Emerson’s PlantWeb™ digital plant architecture.

More The Smart Wireless Advantage and Leading the Smart Wireless Transformation. (Video)