In the past 12 months, I have celebrated two career milestones. It has been 40 years since I began working as a junior development engineer, being the fifth engineer hired at Dranetz Engineering Laboratories when it was on th...
Though Ohm’s Law is a generalized construct that is not as encompassing as Maxwell’s Equations, it is far more understood and used by those in the electricity business. We have used Ohm’s and Kirchhoff’s Laws to understand ho...
When I first became involved with the IEEE working groups on power-quality standards in 1994, IEEE had just published 519 1992, Recommended Practice and Requirements for Harmonic Control in Electric Power Systems. (The next p...
While researching for new information about sags, I found the first reference on Google search to be familiar. It was a paper, “Sags and Swells,” that I wrote in 1994 for the NFPA 70B Technical Committee on Electrical Equipme...
At a small telecommunications facility, equipment mysteriously started self-destructing for no apparent reason. Laptops, routers, printers and cell phones were apparently just becoming nonfunctional. The facility operator’s f...
When a customer complained about the lights flickering in the past, it was difficult to get a quantitative measure of the problem. The parameter, Pst (perceptibility short term), specified in IEC Std 61000-4-15 and eventually...
In the August issue, I reviewed some common power-quality related issues, including insulation failures on a motor’s outer windings, unexplained offline trips of adjustable speed drives, blown fuses on surge suppression strip...
I often receive data files recorded from power quality monitors to analyze the reason a piece of equipment experienced an event. This analysis is followed by determining the cause and who is to blame. Others want to know if t...
In my 40-plus years in the industry, I have analyzed customers’ power quality monitor data files and heard their stories about hundreds of things that have happened in their facilities or homes: some mysterious, some catastro...
Over the past two years, the technical committee responsible for IEEE 1547, Standard for Interconnecting Distributed Resources with Electric Power Systems, has added a section on power quality (PQ), including the parameters,...
It seems like every decade or so, elementary school educators employ a new way of teaching math. When parents try to help, they are greeted with “That’s not how we do it.” Yet the fundamental laws of mathematics haven’t chang...
Reviewing data files from power quality (PQ) monitors to find evidence pointing to the cause of a customer’s problems may sound simple enough for someone who has worked in the industry for more than 35 years. However, it is o...
