Gina Barney is well known to the world-wide lift industry, owing to her many activities in the field. Currently she is Principal of Gina Barney Associates, English Editor of elevatori, Member of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) Lifts Group Committee, Member of the British Standards Institution (BSI) Lift Committees, UK expert to two International Standards Organisation TC178/WG6 Traffic design and WG10 Energy efficiency of lifts and escalators.
Dr Barney has had a wide ranging career starting in the electronics industry, which eventually led to the award of a doctorate on four quadrant thyristor power control in 1965. After many years in universities at Birmingham, UMIST and Manchester as lecturer, senior lecturer and Director of Computer Networking, Dr Barney took early retirement in 1990 to concentrate on consultancy.
Her first contact with the lift industry was in 1968, when she researched Ward-Leonard lift control systems. Since then she has been active as a researcher, consultant, lecturer in the traffic design, traffic control and circulation areas. These “soft” subjects have been complimented by “hard” subjects of lift surveys, audits, contract supervision, safe release training, etc.
Gina is the author of over 100 papers and is the author, co-author or editor of over 20 books (not all on lifts). Her main activities currently are technical writing (she is a member of the Society of Authors) with respect to standards and publications and various training courses. She is also an Associate Member of the Academy of Experts.
Dr Barney has the degrees of BSc, MSc and PhD and the professional qualifications of CEng, FIEE and Eur.Ing. She was recently elected to an Honorary Fellowship of CIBSE for exceptional service to the Institution and recently admitted to be a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Engineers.
ISO 8100-32 Planning and selection of passenger lifts to be installed in office, hotel and residential buildings was published in June 2020 after seven years of development. It is not a safety standard and has commercial implications. It tries to standardize a method to size a lift installation and provide values for rated load, rated speed and number of lifts to meet a defined passenger demand.
The standard was not adopted by the UK as BSI considered it to have too many deficiencies. These included allowing passenger mass (default 75kg) to define lift car occupancy in place of passenger area (default 0.21m²); a research based simulation design method to carry out installation sizing in place of traffic templates and the provision of large-scale charts which can give an inaccurate design. The standard does include the classical design method developed by Barney and Dos Santos in 1975, but uses unconventional symbology to describe it.
ISO 8100-32 Brickbats and Bouquets and all that?
Dr-Eur.Ing Gina Barney¹, Dr Richard Peters².
¹Gina Barney Associates, UK, ²Peters Research Ltd.