Cost Performance and Time
Often us engineers get so bogged down in equations, using software, producing drawings and writing specifications that this becomes the sole focus. ...
Standard Cable & Wire Sizes
IEC 60228 is the International Electrotechnical Commission's international standard on conductors of insulated cables. Among other things, it defines a...
Maximum Demand for Buildings
Estimating maximum demand is a topic frequently discussed. Working out how much power to allow for a building can be very subjective . Allowing too much...
How to Size Power Cable Duct
Some colleagues had an issue earlier in the week on sizing conduits to be cast in concrete for some power cables . It became clear that none of us had...
IEC Reference Designations
The IEC publishes a series of documents and rules governing the preparation of documents, drawings and the referencing of equipment. Depending on country...
RLC Circuit, Resistor Power Loss - some Modelica experiments
Modelica is an open source (free) software language for modelling complex systems. Having never used it before, I thought I would download a development...
Control Theory
Control theory looks at how systems work and are controlled from a mathematical view. This note gives a brief introduction to some of the concepts – more...
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was born exactly at midnight on July 10, 1856 in the tiny village of Smiljan, Lika in Croatia. In his late teens, Tesla left the village to...
Why use catalogues
I'm a fan of using manufacturers catalogues. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, if your involved in the purchase of equipment, you will likely...
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...