Emerson Process Management named Edison Awards finalist

The Emerson Innovation Center - Fisher Technology and the Fisher Control-Disk rotary valve have been named finalists for the internationally known 2011 Edison Best New Product Awards. The Edison Awards symbolise the persistence and excellence personified by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

The Emerson Innovation Center has been recognised in the category of Living, Working and Learning Environments. Opened in May 2010, the Emerson Innovation Center is a highly specialised engineering testing facility and flow lab designed to help customers tackle challenges facing process manufacturing and energy industries. The flow lab enables valves to be tested in real-world plant conditions to ensure reliability, environmental compliance and safety before being installed at a customer site.

The Fisher Control-Disk rotary valve is a finalist in the Applied Technology category. The Control-Disk offers excellent throttling performance and is ideal for applications that involve fast processes and varying pressure drops, such as in the chemical, pulp and paper, and metals and mining industries. An equal percentage flow characteristic provides an improved throttling range comparable to that of a segmented ball valve. This allows control closer to the target setpoint, regardless of process disturbances, resulting in a reduction in process variability.

“This year’s awards recognise a broad array of innovations including far-reaching products, services and technologies that impact daily life,” said Edison Awards Steering Committee Chair Sarah Miller Caldicott, a great grandniece of Thomas Edison. “The awards applaud the forward-thinking innovations for which Thomas Edison remains internationally admired. It’s exciting to see companies like Emerson continuing his legacy of challenging conventional thinking.”

The ballot of nominees for the Edison Best New Product Awards is judged by roughly 2000 members of the not-for-profit Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), an organisation comprising America’s top marketing professionals and academics. In a comprehensive peer-review process, the nominees are judged on marketplace innovation, marketplace success, technological innovation, market structure innovation, societal impact and design innovation.

“Emerson is honoured to be recognised for these innovation awards because it is so clearly aligned with our commitment to help our customers solve the toughest problems, while helping them run smarter plants that improve production quality, lower operations and maintenance costs, and enhance environmental performance and worker safety,” said Terry Buzbee, President Emerson Process Management, Fisher division.

The Edison Awards are granted under the aegis of the Thomas A Edison Papers at Rutgers University, a globally recognised research network dedicated to the study of innovation and its application in the 21st century. For more information about the Edison Award finalists, visit www.edisonawards.com.