Notes

Lighting - Lamps

By Steven McFadyen on 5/29/2012 1:28 PM

Lamps are the essential part of any luminaire. These are the light generating components. Since the advent of electrical lighting in the middle of the 19th century, multiple types of lamps have been ... read more..

Voltage Drop in Installations - Concepts

By Steven McFadyen on 9/27/2011 7:50 AM

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

Differential protection, the good old days

By Steven McFadyen on 10/3/2011 1:52 PM

This morning I was explaining how differential protection works to a junior engineer. To give him something to read I opened up the NPAG (Network Protection and Automation Guide, by Areva) and turned to... read more..

Back to basics - the Watt (or kW)

By Steven McFadyen on 8/4/2011 1:13 AM

When thinking about watts (W) or kilowatt (kW = 1000 W) it can be useful too keep in mind the fundamental ideas behind the unit. Watt is not a pure electrical or mechanical unit, but is a measure of the... read more..

Smarter Electrical Distribution

By Steven McFadyen on 4/24/2011 2:52 AM

The other day I came across an article in Technology Review on the development of a smart transformer. A professor at North Carolina State University is developing a transistor based transformer ca... read more..

Lead us, Warleader

By Steven McFadyen on 3/16/2011 10:56 PM

Delum, who had watched all in silence, his face empty of expression, now spoke in turn. ' "Lead us, Warleader, into glory."'

Reading is something I do regularly and at the moment I'm workin... read more..

New Mail Chimp

By Steven McFadyen on 9/26/2011 6:54 AM

We've been sending out Newsletters on a regular basis for a few weeks now. To do this we have been using Google's Feedburner service. While Feedburner is a fantastic product (and free of cost), to impro... read more..

Paths of Flight

By Steven McFadyen on 11/29/2010 10:26 PM

GE have put together a time-lapse video shown flight take-off and landings at some airports. An interesting view: read more..

Why is electricity so hard to understand?

By Steven McFadyen on 3/1/2011 12:48 AM

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 when trying to explain something (i.e. electricit... read more..

IEEE Winds of Change

By Steven McFadyen on 9/30/2010 3:25 AM

IEEE TV has a part series of videos on wind power and it's implication. For a really good overview to the technologies and issues around wind power, these videos are excellent. Each video is around 10 m... read more..

Getting Started with Patents

By Steven McFadyen on 7/21/2010 11:55 PM

If you have a great idea or invent something the last thing you want is someone to steal the idea. One of the things you can do is protect the intellectual property of on the idea by using patents. read more..

MIT OpenCourseWare

By Steven McFadyen on 7/7/2010 11:41 PM

MIT OpenCourseWare, makes the materials used in teaching all MIT subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. read more..

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Autonomous Vehicle Challenge

Two driverless and solar power vans have departed from Italy on their way to China via the silk road. During the 13,000 kM trip the vans will drive themselves...

LED Replacement Light Bulb

The inventor of the first visible light-emitting diode makes history again this year as it begins to show customers a 40-watt replacement GE Energy Smart...

Star-Delta Motor Starting - Performance

Many questions sent in to the site are in connection with motor starting and in particular star-delta. For all but the simplest application, there is...

Battery Sizing

This article gives an introduction to IEEE 485 method for the selection and calculation of battery capacity.

Hazardous Areas – IEC and NEC/CEC Comparison

Depending where in the world you work, you are likely following one of two standards International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) National...

Cables for MV Power Distribution - Earthed versus Unearthed Systems

Power cables can basically be classified into earthed and unearthed cables, where earthed and unearthed refer to the application for which the cable is...

Understanding LV Circuit Breaker Fault Ratings

I think this post is going to be helpful to several of our readers. While the IEC low voltage circuit breaker Standard [IEC 60947-2, Low voltage switchgear...

How a Digital Substation Works

Traditionally substations have used circuit breakers, current transformers (CT), voltage transformers (VT) and protection relays all wired together using...

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...

8 Motor parts and common faults

Straight forward list of some common motor faults. If I have missed any other common faults, please take a bit of time to add them in as a comment below...

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