A Proposal for Broadening the Education of Power System Engineers

Engineering education has placed its major emphasis on developing graduates with a high degree of technical competence in the traditional engineering disciplines. However, society's expectations for the role of an engineer now reflect the increased concern for inclusion of social policy considerations in engineering decision making. Engineering education must respond to these changes so that engineers will be better prepared to meet today's changes. The authors have focused their discussion on suggested modifications to the power system engineering curriculum as an example of the changing needs of a typical engineering program. The paper discusses some of the limitations the authors perceive in the present education of most power system engineers including a lack of study of nontraditional alternatives to central station power generation. Many of the suggested topics can be added to existing courses; for example, power system planning which could be expanded to cover topics such as load management systems and innovative rate designs which influence load patterns. The addition to the curriculum of a course which provides engineers with a broad overview of the laws affecting engineering decisions and the social policy these laws seek to implement is recommended. Such a course should broaden an engineer's perspective of his/her role in society. The authors feel that this overall proposal is responsive to the needs to be faced by many of the future power engineering graduates. The suggested curriculum changes and additions should aid power system engineers in understanding their role in solving society's energy-related problems.     

On Costs, Benefits and Malefits in Technology Assessment

Cost-benefit analysis has been criticized on numerous grounds. It is common in such analyses to treat undesirable side effects (including risks) as external or social costs and to quantify these costs insofar as possible. In this paper I take the view that both desired effects (benefits) and undesired effects (malefits) are outputs of the technology. Costs are the dollars paid for the mixture of benefits and malefits actually produced. It is a futile and often misleading exercise to attempt to quantify the value of the net output of a public-service technology. A social-political decision must be taken as to whether or not the total output is worth the cost. If citizens are to participate usefully in such a decision, they need to understand the nature of this total output. Dollar-quantification of ``benefits' and ``external costs' obscures the actual physical-social effects of the technology. Cost-benefit analysis is a better tool for advocacy in technological decisions than for informing the public. By focusing attention on formulas and numbers, the analysis seems to substitute scientific reasoning for the painful process of making value judgments. But the value judgments are always present; they can be concealed but not escaped. Technological decisions are more political than scientific.     

On the job: validating data

Any job in engineering, including most certainly those in electrical and computer engineering, inevitably involves the generation of large amounts of data. The data can come from analysis, computation and/or measurement. Data can be associated with tasks ranging from basic research to development to design and testing. As a result, many questions can arise over its reliability and validity. While bad decisions and bad conclusions can be reached, even when the data is perfect, good decisions and good conclusions certainly cannot be made when the data is faulty. The article briefly considers some aspects of the fundamental question, "How can data be validated?".     

A study of grounding resistance reduction agent using granulated blast furnace slag

One by-product of steel making, granulated blast furnace slag, is often wasted. When it is used, it is used in civil engineering and building engineering and mostly applied to road-building. It will soon have many other environmental uses. The granulated blast furnace slag has similar characteristics to glue, and low resistivity was found. With a cement-hydrate catalyst, it can be used to produce glue and, as such, it should be used as a grounding resistance reduction agent. Adding different proportions of water, cement, and salt, the resistivity and clot strength of the grounding resistance reduction agent was studied to find an optimal combination. This finished product can be used in a grounding resistance reduction agent, within which the grounding bar is buried. Our measurements have shown that this method can effectively reduce grounding resistance.     

Social informatics and service learning as teaching models

We have proposed a framework to integrate social and ethical issues into science and engineering curricula. We have also shown how such a framework might be implemented across a curriculum, and how it might be applied to the study of a specific scientific problem. Our framework is based on basic foundations of applied engineering ethics, adaptation of the structure of the meta-discipline of social informatics, and the use of a service-learning pedagogy based on Perry's (1981) cognitive-structural model for intellectual development in college students. The structure of the taxonomy of social informatics research and issues offer a well-established framework that can be re-contextualized for many science and engineering fields. Service learning offers a clear model for giving students the opportunity to practice ethical and social concepts imparted to them in the classroom.     

Silicon-germanium

The strong points of compound and single element semiconductors are united in a new type of transistor, silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistor (Si-Ge HBT). The device is the offshoot of bandgap engineering and the manufacturing economics of silicon. Silicon-germanium is a new material used in making microchips for less expensive, high-performance communications tools. Low energy consumption and processing at ultra-high speeds make silicon-germanium transistors a treasure for many people in microelectronics. Silicon-germanium is a critical breakthrough in an anxiety-laden field. Practitioners fear that traditional silicon technology is nearing its physical limits. Higher speeds cannot be attained without miniaturization to a point at which the devices no longer function     

Property rights versus stewardship

Industries and families continue to forsake American cities for suburban and formerly rural sites, simultaneously leaving non-productive sites (“brownfields”) in the cities and removing “greenfield” land from agricultural or biologically productive use. With a few exceptions, urban regions that once functioned as communities are continuing to undergo economic and social decline. Discussion or debate about the problem (including whether it is a problem at all) invokes often-unexamined systems of values or worldviews. Students of business, manufacturing engineering, and industrial engineering are taught about the importance of site selection for new production facilities from a competitiveness perspective; but social and environmental impacts per se of these economics based decisions are not part of the criteria. The author argues that decisions regarding new site locations made by manufacturing companies also should include social and environmental values in addition to economic criteria. Because it is in the public interest for companies to incorporate these additional decision criteria, the public policy process must be used to create incentive. A method is offered to help mitigate the problem of colliding worldviews     

Why Washington matters in the silicon valley

Even though many US technological achievements are born elsewhere, decisions that affect the future viability of all types of engineering are made regularly on Capitol Hill (Washington, DC). In fact, public policy has an enormous impact on the direction of the careers of engineers. From the impact of research and development allocations to global competitiveness stemming from our national industrial policy, to the management of information-age resources, such as the radio spectrum, engineers often operate in an environment that is the cumulative product of years of political manipulation. The article looks at how political decisions can affect engineering and technology from innovation to manufacture. Currently, controversial legislative proposals have the potential to disrupt, misdirect, and channel the hard work of engineers towards more limited innovation. Rather than dream large, some engineers are more than willing to work within the confines of a given system. However, paying attention to the dynamics of public policy is important. Otherwise, engineers may find their lush rainforest of innovation shrinking at the edges until it just dots the horizon.     

Economic evaluation approaches for new technology

The thrust of development supporting new medical devices and agents for the treatment of disease rightfully remains focused on the scientific and clinical underpinnings that justify the use of such new products and the replacement of others. Many devices and agents are introduced in the United States each year, and diagnostic and therapeutic regimens (standards of care) are often adapted to integrate new technology. When and how to use new devices and compounds can be problematic to clinicians, and it is difficult for payers (insurance companies and the federal government) to assess these new technologies for the purpose of coverage and reimbursement. For example, many chemotherapeutic compounds are effective as single agents but become even more effective when used in combination with other agents. In the most dramatic example, the development of new biologicals and immunotherapies continues at a brisk pace; these agents often display intricate chemical characteristics and represent the practical results of combinatorial and other advanced methodologies for synthesizing, and screening candidate molecules. Payers will have to make coverage decisions on these and other emerging technologies using methods involving health economics and health technology assessment. The economic valuation of new technology is an important tool for those making coverage and policy decisions. Here we explore some of the characteristics of economic valuations and their use.     

Sensorless controls of salient‐pole permanent magnet synchronous motors using extended electromotive force models

In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model for synchronous motors and a sensorless control method based on it. To control permanent magnet synchronous motors, knowledge of rotor position and velocity are necessary. Heretofore, expensive sensors have been used to detect rotor position information. Although many sensorless control methods based on the electromotive force (EMF) have been developed for non‐salient‐pole permanent magnet motors, they cannot be applied for salient‐pole motors without approximation because of complications in the mathematical model; this is turn may lead to problems of instability. To solve this problem, we propose an extended electromotive force model for synchronous motors. The proposed model has a simple structure, making position estimation possible without approximation. Experimental results show that the proposed model and method are valid. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 146(3): 55–64, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.10257     

How Colleges Try to Attract More Women Students

Activities by universities to attract more women and enrollments of women in engineering schools have both increased dramatically in the last two years. Survey responses from 70 institutions show that less than half have a staff member with specific responsibility to work toward increasing the enrollment of women. However, most institutions indicated that they were making efforts to attract more women students. Recruiting activities include the development and use of printed materials and other promotional materials; scholarship programs; academic year conferences; summer programs; and high school visits. Not all universities felt that retention of women students was a problem, but many did have activities which tended to increase the chances that women students would complete their degrees in engineering. Such efforts include providing social support, offering special advising, giving recognition for achievement, providing role models, offering opportunity for involvement, helping women gain job experience, and making financial aid available to part-time students. Lack of commitment, funding, staff time, and know-how are offered as possible factors responsible for the somewhat limited scope of present recruiting activities. An approach to setting up planned, comprehensive programs for women is offered.     

Education for Specific Needs Company-Sponsored Courses

An electric public utility, facing a necessary change in organization structure and a continuing problem of managerial replacements, discovered a dearth of managers immediately capable of assuming larger responsibilities. A full-scale inventory of managerial resources was undertaken, and a four-pronged appraisal tool was used to produce composite individual appraisals. A comparison of appraisals with position specifications revealed numerous instances of potential ability and aptitude, but inadequate present knowledge of the concepts and skills of business management, as well as frequent cases of unfamiliarity with the complex factors involved in applying economic analysis to engineering decisions. Exploration of personal histories revealed that, in such instances, neither undergraduate education nor postbaccalaureate experience had been sufficient to insure competence in the managerial and economic areas. Establishment of a 4-week school dealing with management concepts; evening seminars dealing with the skills of leadership, communications, decision making, and delegation; and a 30-hour course in engineering economics were among the internal developmental activities undertaken by the company to provide an effective solution to some of its most pressing problems of employee education and development.     

Ecological government: redefining democratic institutions

In many constitutional democracies, a resource allocation system has evolved which bears little resemblance to that prescribed by their constitutions. Due to systemic features of these decision-making frameworks, powerful development interests now receive benefits from public resources that are (arguably) disproportionate to their reciprocal contribution to the general public. This has occurred because despite constitutional safeguards for preventing the abuse of power, private interests were able to obtain control of public resources and hence, over time, more power to shape government processes and decisions. This transition from government to corporate prominence is generally shrugged off as the inevitable consequence of the democratic process. It is suggested in the paper, however, that it is partly attributable to constitutional design, and that the shift in power should be reconceptualized as systemic corruption. The underlying argument is that environmental and social justice cannot be maintained without a system of government that is relevant to ecological realities     

Robotics-Centered Outreach Activities: An Integrated Approach

Nowadays, universities are making extensive efforts to attract prospective students to the fields of electrical, electronic, and computer engineering. Thus, outreach is becoming increasingly important, and activities with schoolchildren are being extensively carried out as part of this effort. In this context, robotics is a very attractive and effective tool for fostering interest in science and technology among children and young people and for attracting them toward engineering. In this article, experience with different robotics-centered outreach activities in the Universidad de Chile (UCH), Santiago, Chile, will be shared. These activities include robotics courses for children, social robots as keynote speakers, mechatronics design courses, and participation in international robotics competitions, which contribute synergistically to the goal of attracting students to UCH's Electrical Engineering (EE) Department. Owing to its novelty, the use of social robots as keynote speakers for schoolchildren will be described in detail. Experimental results that demonstrate how sophisticated social robots can be used to foster the interest of young people in technology will be shown. Altogether, more than 3000 schoolchildren have participated directly in these outreach activities here in Chile, creating a sizeable impact in this country.      

Educating Engineers for Social Problem Solving

There are many signs that engineers can and will make contributions to the understanding of social systems and to social problem solving. The peculiarities associated with social systems research, especially as it takes place in an educational setting, are examined in detail. There has been a traditional strong bond between engineering education and research, and it is essential to examine this new area to determine those factors which will affect the evolution of meaningful projects and curricula. Social systems research has many characteristics which differentiate it from other well known engineering research areas. The role of the academic participants in this research will be different from the past. The employment opportunities for engineers educated to do social problem solving will open new avenues of professional activity. A variety of observations and proposals are made to help the evolution of this new engineering direction proceed quickly and smoothly.     

Google Earth在东帝汶国家电网工程中的应用

当前越来越多的勘测设计单位承接境外电网工程,但又经常收集不到如地形图等基础资料,本文利用Google Earth提供的全球免费的地图影像平台,进行电网工程的优化设计,数据采集,生成断面图,排干定位,最后直观的显示出整个路径图,从而弥补了在国外勘测设计时基础数据的不足,同时也分析了采集Google Eanh三维影像数据进行初步排干定位的可行性,提高了勘测设计效率,对部分国内电网工程的勘测设计也有一定的借鉴作用。     

As Singular as a Delta Function? [Microwave Surfing]

I am sure that many readers of Lucky's column share his trepidations (as I do) when it comes to making sense of quantum electrodynamics. Even P.A.M. Dirac (1902-1984), who shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Schr?dinger in 1933, might have commiserated. Dirac (who received his first undergraduate degree in electrical engineering) felt that the quantum world could not be described in words or represented as images. To draw its picture would be "like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it's gone" [2]. He remarked on this challenge even in his Nobel Banquet Speech [3] of December 10, 1933: "But the physicist is at a disadvantage in this respect on account of the very specialized nature of his work, which cannot be made intelligible without an intensive preliminary course of study."     

基于模糊隶属函数的变压器色谱峰定性算法

把模糊技术引入了电力变压器色谱峰定性领域。该算法为:把要定性的色谱峰位作为模糊矢量,把各个成分作为模糊集元素,峰位相对于成分的隶属度函数用成分的绝对保留时间来构造,不失一般性,隶属度函数的形状取为三角形,2个相邻成分绝对保留时间中点的隶属度值设为50%,若某个峰位相对于某个成分的隶属度函数值大于50%,则这个峰位就是所用隶属度函数的那个成分的峰位,若存在多个峰位隶属于某个成分,则隶属度最大的那个峰位是相应成分的峰位,其余是假峰。对该算法进行了测试,结果表明:该算法方法简单,抗峰漂移性能良好,可以剔除假峰,具有显著的优点。     

上安电厂三期主厂房地基处理方案优化分析

上安电厂是国家重点项目,地基处理是项目建设中的关键环节,本文在借鉴一、二期工程经验的基础上,为实现业主提出的“高速度、高质量、低造价”的方针,使业主以合理的投资获得最佳的经济效益和社会效益,根据本期主厂房荷载大小、场地岩土工程条件及现场施工环境,对主厂房地基处理方案进行了优化分析,最终确定了适宜的桩型—预应力钢筋混凝土管桩,得到了业主及专家的充分认可。     

电力行业工程公司有关价值链的分析

CPCEC 所处的是电力勘测设计行业、电力工程咨询业, 其内在规律之一是价值链, 即: 工程价值链、行业价值链、企业价值链、客户价值链。文章通过对有关价值链的分析指出, CPCEC 的发展定位是工程公司, 重点发展业务领域是工程总承包、工程项目管理。CPCEC 要在价值链上精耕细作, 不断发掘和提升客户价值, 鼓励员工争当“值得信赖的工程专家”, 实现企业又好又快发展。