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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Low Voltage Circuit Breakers

Circuit breakers are switching devices whose primary function is to isolate parts of an electrical distribution system in the even of abnormal conditions...

What is a rectifier transformer?

I've recently come across this question a couple times browsing the internet. Decided to give a quick answer here. A rectifier transformer is a transformer...

Post Editing Tips

If you at all familiar with programs like office and outlook, then adding and editing posts is pretty straightforward and intuitive. However, there are...

The ac resistance of conductors

In a previous article I looked at the dc resistance of conductors and in this article we turn our attention to ac resistance. If you have not read the...

IEC 60287 Current Capacity of Cables - Rated Current

In the previous note we looked at the approach taken by the standard to the sizing of cables and illustrated this with an example. We then looked at one...

Understanding Motor Duty Rating

One of the comments on my Motor Starting Series was asking for something on duty cycles. Here it is. As a purchaser of a motor, you have responsibility...

Motor Insulation

Insulation on a motor prevents interconnection of windings and the winding to earth. When looking at motors, it is important to understand how the insulation...

What are you reading!

Reading is a bit of a hobby of mine and I"ve done a few off-topic posts in the past on this. Rather than continue doing the occasional post I thought ...

HTML Symbol Entities

HTML supports a variety of entity symbols which can be entered using either numbers or an entity name. The number or name is preceded by the ‘&’ sign...

Closed Doors

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong...

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