Steven McFadyen's Articles

Steven is a Chartered electrical engineering consultant with considerable experience on major internationally recognised and award winning projects in Europe, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His expertise has been called on for numerous technically challenging projects in power systems, airports, rail, mining, pharmaceutical, datacentre, and other industries.



Why is electricity so hard to understand?

It's been a busy few months on different projects or busy couple of decades depending on how I look at it. I can say that on the odd (frequent) occasion...

Are We Losing Professional Integrity

I have been thinking recently that there appears to be less professional integrity around than when I first started my career in electrical engineering...

Cable Sizing Software

When sizing cables nearly, everyone uses some form of software. This ranges from homespun spreadsheets to complex network analyses software. Each has its...

Magicians of Engineering

The other day I was reading 'Night of the New Magicians' by Mary Pope Osborn with my son.  The story is about a young boy and girl who travel back in time...

ABB Technical Guides - Motor Operation

ABB has produced a range of technical guides that offer concise explanations of the major technologies and technical issues in low voltage AC drives. ...

Voltage Drop in Installations - Concepts

Problems on achieving maximum voltage drop within an installation come up often. Depending where you live, local regulations will have different limits...

Induction Motor Calculator

Just added a page to the tools, which will allow you to calculate the synchronous speed, slip and rated torque for an induction motor. Not a particularly...

Equipment Verification (to IEC Standards)

One of the requirements to ensuring that everything works is to have equipment selected, manufactured and verified [tested] to IEC standards. Not all equipment...

Robotics - Home Innovations

We have a sister note to this (Robots - Interesting Video), in which I have posted some videos of interesting robots developed by commercial corporations...

Electric Motors

Collection of links to various places with useful motor information. I’ll try and return to the page every now and again to update it with any motor notes...

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