As applied to process sensing and instrumentation, wireless technologies seem to have reached the threshold of a calm middle age. The adolescent struggles for identity, the academic fights, the mind-numbing cramming to learn new ways and means, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back learning curves, all are fading into a comfortable glow of success.

“So, where,” Bud Dungan asks, “has everyone been?” Dungan, President of Gastronics Inc. , Bedford Heights, Ohio, began leading his company into its solid niche in wireless gas monitoring when wireless was nearly unknown in process settings. As an early convert to the technology, Dungan has worked his way through a number of radio technologies (and a number of listening post and network backbone schemes) since his first installation more than 12 years ago. His company’s products are found in wastewater treatment , oil-and-gas production and processing, chemical production , and pulp and paper . Gastronics sensors detect chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, oxygen and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), as well as combustibility and flame.

Today, Gastronics is firmly in the standards camp. Its first ISA100 device was released late last year, seen in an ISA100.11a demonstration tour of the Arkema Houston plant the day before ISAExpo 2009 on Oct. 5, 2009. ISA100 is a standard promulgated by the International Society of Automation (ISA).

More accurately, the device offers ISA100.11a connectivity among several others. Its transmitter is modular, allowing users to select from a range of standards. Among the gas detector’s options: ISA100.11a 2.4 Gigahertz (GHz) Mesh, UHF/VHF radio (for ultra-high frequency/very high frequency), GPRS, (for General Packet Radio Service), cellular radio and low Earth orbit satellite connectivity.

When wireless first crept into industry, of course, standards had no play, for a simple reason—no specific industrial standards were in place. “In 1996, we were freshmen in the school of hard knocks,” Dungan says. “We enrolled the day we got a request to add radio telemetry to our sensors for chlorine monitoring. The customer wanted to get out from under re-trenching and rewiring units on its periphery, because that meant spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had never tried our sensing strategies. We had never done wireless. It took six months.”

The company’s move to standards had two root causes. First, research and development at Gastronics is averse to re-inventing the wheel. If someone else makes a better radio or network device, Gastronics will find ways to connect with it. Engineering the connection is far easier when the technical details are encapsulated in standards than when the interface must be built from the ground up. Second, beginning a few years ago, Dungan began hearing a plea for standards as he visited customer sites—customers were growing weary of roadblocks to network centralization.

“And we kept hearing ISA100,” he explains. “In fact, it’s all that I heard. So, our first industry-specific standard product is ISA100.” That said, modularity of design will enable WirelessHart at some point in 2010. “Our radio manufacturer is working on WirelessHart certification,” Dungan says. “My philosophy is simple: You tell me where you want to be, and I’ll meet you there.” WirelessHart is another industrial wireless networking standard, which is promulgated by the Hart Communication Foundation.

Dungan summarizes the situation: “We joined the wireless market a decade ago,” he says. “And for a decade, it’s been an emerging market. Well, it has finally emerged, thanks to standards.”

How far wireless has moved beyond any teething pains is signaled in a project delivered jointly by automation suppliers ProSoft Technology Inc. , Bakersfield, Calif., and Emerson Process Management , Austin, Texas. A mid-California upstream oil-and-gas-producer sought to instrument its steam pressures at two gas wells, part of a secondary recovery operation to obtain as much gas as possible. The installation was done in less than two weeks.

At each well, Emerson supplied devices from the Rosemount 3051S series of instruments. These consist of WirelessHart-enabled, inline pressure transmitters, which send data via a smart wireless gateway to a ProSoft network device, an RLXIB-IHW-66 RadioLinx Industrial Hotspot, positioned near the wells. ProSoft rounded out the application by radioing data from this device to a second RadioLinx hotspot functioning as a data gathering station at the control room a mile away, via ProSoft’s Ethernet-based industrial IEEE 802.11 technology (a standard promulgated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—IEEE).

“In most people’s minds, a mile is a stretch for 802.11,” says Jim Schliem, wireless project manager for ProSoft. In other contexts, 802.11 technology is known as Wi-Fi (for Wireless Fidelity), “but our industrial backhaul ...