Following its launch in 2000 of a "Patent Rights Incentive Program" to encourage employees to register their innovations, Endress+Hauser, a leading supplier of measuring instruments and automation solutions for the industrial process engineering industry, filed 173 patent applications in 2005.
In recognition of this achievement more than 200 inventors attended the company's Innovators" Meeting 2006, where the Patent Rights Incentive Awards were presented for the group's three "most economically important" patents issued last year.
The recipients were:
- Dr Robert Lalla, who developed a new circuit configuration that can analyse the signals transmitted by pressure sensors from different "sensor worlds" and adapt to different types of sensors;
- Dr Martin Anklin-Imhof and Dr Alfred Wenger, who used rings to minimise the high internal pressure innate in Corilis flowmeters that work on the principle of "vibrating pipe" technology; and
- Stephan Konrad, who overcame the problem of excessive electricity consumption by optocouplers in modern temperature probes by developing a circuit component that uses a small transformer to achieve galvanic separation.