(By John Sonley)

For more than twenty years, I have been employed in the business of flammable and toxic gas hazards and gas detection with 10 years spent as Managing Director of International Gas Detectors Limited, Wetherby, West Yorkshire.

From 1974 to 1978 I was employed by British Gas as a Research and Development Scientist and it was in 1978 that I published European Patent Application 79300345.0 for the first of what was to become a new generation of reliable catalytic flammable gas sensors. Moving to IGD in 1978, my Company began an extensive development programme to overcome the practical difficulties associated with using gas detection systems of that era and subsequently introduced to the oil and petrochemical industry the first commercially available poison-resistant pellistor, Patent number 2066963A July 1981. This breakthrough and the business that was spawned from its success linked my Company with the role of problem solving, a position it enjoyed for more than ten years. In 1983 to augment other export activities, I incorporated IGD Inc. in Houston and established distributors in selected States, particularly Texas, California and Alaska.

As a major expansion of business activity during 1984, I established in joint venture, EIGD Limited, a specialist infrared analysis Company that had developed a novel and patented solid-state optical cell and was geographically located on the Research Park of Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh. Whilst initial work concentrated on flammable gas sensing using infrared techniques, it was a decline within the oil industry shortly thereafter, that redirected Company effort to produce carbon dioxide rather than flammable gas monitors.

International and European standardisation of gas detectors increased in importance with the approach of a Common European Market and for the past 20 years I have been a member of Committee GEL/31/19 which generated BS6020 and BS6959 together with Committee SC31/9 which has now prepared a harmonised European Standard for industrial flammable gas detectors. Some years ago I was elected Chairman of BSI Committee GEL/31/19 and CENELEC Committees SC31/9 and TC216. In 1988 the transfer of ownership of IGD presented the opportunity for me to become independent and extend my particular interest in providing an on-site survey, design, audit and training service World-wide in the correct choice, application, use and maintenance of both flammable and toxic gas fixed installation detection systems, with a particular emphasis on sensor type and head location to provide optimum coverage at minimum cost. In this role I have site surveyed oil and gas plant from the heat of Libya (Marsa el Brega) and Tunisia (Sfax) to the cold of the Komi Republic in Russia (Usinsk- Vozey Oilfield) as well as many other sites both on-shore and offshore within the UK and mainland Europe.