NAMUR Award 2018

At the 2018 NAMUR Annual General Meeting held on 09 November 2018, two outstanding doctoral theses were honoured with the NAMUR Award.
Dr. Maik Riedel received the NAMUR Award for his doctoral thesis Ein Beitrag zur wissensbasierten Unterstützung bei der Auswahl technischer Resourcen (A contribution to providing knowledge-based support in selecting technical resources).

The thesis was written at the Fakultät für Maschinenbau (Department of Mechanical Engineering) of the Helmut-Schmidt-Universität der Bundeswehr in Hamburg and supervised by Professor Alexander Fay.

In his thesis Maik Riedel addressed the question of how the selection of suitable sensors and actuators for process plants could be supported by computer-based systems. He was motivated by the activities of Technical Committee 2.40 Flow metering technology of the VDE/VDI Society for Measurement and Automatic Control.

In three use cases, i.e. flow sensors, actuators and final control elements, the challenge and, at the same time, the objective was to model existing domain-specific knowledge according to a newly developed concept, including the associated methodology and the tools implemented, and to perform a software-based evaluation using real-world cases.

Dr. Riedel’s thesis sends a clear message as to how - given the forthcoming generation change and the threat of a shortage of skilled labour - expert systems can in future support not only the engineering of process plants, but also decision-making processes.

Dr. Markus Vogelbacher received the NAMUR Award for his doctoral thesis Eine neue Methode zur kamerabasierten Analyse von Mehrstoffbrennern in industriellen Verbrennungsprozessen (A new method for the camera-based analysis of multi-fuel burners in industrial combustion processes). The thesis was written at the Fakultät für Maschinenbau (Department of Mechanical Engineering) of the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) and supervised by Professor Veit Hagenmeyer.

Dr. Vogelbacher applied the camera-based process management methods he had developed to demonstrate on an industrial scale how CO2 emissions of energy-intensive multi-fuel burner processes can be successfully reduced by saving conventional fuels.

Based on infra-red camera images, he identified the real-time combustion behaviour of substitute fuels which, compared with conventional fuels, have highly fluctuating characteristics, and used newly developed imaging processes to adapt the burner parameters on-line by controlling the fluctuating fuel characteristics.

NAMUR congratulates the winners.

left to right: Hagemeyer, Vogelbacher, Riedel, Fay, Oehlert

Every year NAMUR presents the NAMUR Award for outstanding scientific theses (diploma/master’s and doctoral theses) in the field of intelligent process and operations management submitted to universities and universities of applied sciences.
The award is endowed with EUR 1,000 for a diploma/master’s thesis and EUR 2,000 for a doctoral thesis.
Since 2017 NAMUR has also given an additional EUR 2,500 each to the tutoring chairs of the winners to be used for supportung young scientists working in process automation.