Ohio Semitronics recently had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by California Polytechnic State University. During the roundtable discussion, industry experts spoke with engineering students about emerging trends, needs and products for power measurement in a variety of fields such as alternative energy, oil exploration, environmental engineering, aeronautical engineering, medical and bio engineering.
After completing the presentations on power measurement sensors, pressure sensors and linear position sensors, the roundtable discussion turned into a “stump the experts” session. And those Cal Poly kids are pretty sharp. The students would mention their field of interest and ask what types of products they would encounter. We were glad to answer the student’s questions about products and applications. But, even more important than products and their applications is the need to have a real understanding of power itself.
In universities, students learn about “clean power” – that is to say sinusoidal waves in which electrical voltage changes smoothly from positive polarity to negative polarity and back again 60 times per cycle. But, in modern-day commercial applications, power is often “dirty.” Modern industrial equipment, including things like desktop computers and microprocessor-based devices, can create harmonic distortions resulting in non-sinusoidal (distorted) wave forms.
Having a thorough understanding of power is becoming more important with the advent of new variable frequency drives, inverters for solar and wind energy, and other emerging sources of energy that invariably produce complex or distorted waveforms. This presents a special challenge in making electrical measurements, particularly when you consider that conventional instrumentation often cannot cope with these complex waveforms. Yet, with the constant push for newer and more efficient forms of energy, it is becoming more vital for graduating engineering students to understand how to work with and measure all types of power.
Understanding the parameters for measuring power will help future engineers excel in their fields of interest. At Ohio Semitronics, we’re pleased and honored to “pay it forward” and share some of our knowledge with the talented engineering students at Cal Poly.
Flickr Photo Credit:youngthousands
