fundamentals. The fact is this; our professors teach us to become professors. That's fair enough. The best students in our class became professors. An engineer you become with practical experience by associating with other engineers, facing multiple engineering applications and problems, making mistakes and reaching accomplishments.
Recently, I spoke to a professor about Variable frequency drives (VFDs), Chapter 15. I was telling him how I use them to regulate the plant flows on demand so I can employ smaller storage tanks, etc., while he was talking about flux vectors inside the rectifiers. “I'm not trying to make rectifiers. I'm just applying them for various useful plant applications,” I told him? That's the difference. Because of this issue, many engineering schools are changing. Nowadays, students are forced to work between the semesters. Students are telling me that it's a hard go, as it is not easy to land summer jobs as unfinished engineers.
If you happen to get a job with a manufacturer, your life may be a bit easier. You will be trained for a specific job to work on some electrical equipment, such as improving a lightning arrester, rectifier, or a grounding switch. Soon, you will notice that designing a piece of electrical equipment is mostly of making it smaller, cooler, and with different materials. Then, you also realize that the job is 10% electrical and 90% mechanical engineering, and start wondering: “Is that it?” Well, maybe you'll like it. I didn't.
I graduated with a diploma on power transformers. My first job for two years was mostly how to make better cooling for transformers. I worked on hollow conductors for cooling water passing through them. There was nothing electrical about that. Why didn't they hire a mechanical engineer to do that, I wondered? On the other hand, if you get a job to design power systems for various plants it's a different story. It's an electrical story.
So, between you and me, I had enough of mechanical engineering and them taking advantage of us and bossing us around by saying; “I was not smart enough, so I went into mechanical engineering.” I heard that line a lot. With this book, I want to even out the playing field and help you young electrical engineers stand your ground, be productive, and contribute almost immediately.
One of my first job interviews was at Toronto Hydro. An engineer showed me a picture and asked me if I knew what it was? I saw six bushings and said that it was a transformer. I was wrong. It was a high voltage oil circuit breaker. I failed that job interview. I should have known that a breaker had six identical insulators. Transformer has 3 + 3 unequal bushings.
I moved on, looking for my first job in Canada and ended up at Pinkerton Glass for a job interview. A secretary gave me a test sheet to fill in before meeting an engineer. The sheet said “Practical test for electricians.” I filled it up as best as I could, guessing on a half of it. I failed that one too. None of those famous differential equations could have helped me. It was so bad; the Engineer didn't even waste his time to see me.
Many years later I was already an experienced engineer. Our company, Fluor, had a project with the Xerox Corp. in NY State. As a lead electrical engineer I was invited to visit the plant and scope the work for adding a new ink toner line to the existing plant. We started touring this large plant. As an electrical engineer I prefer to look first at the plant overall one line diagram. This is the Chapter 2 in this book. Having acquired the big picture, then I visit the plant and observe it from my electrical perspective. Well, anyway, we started touring as soon as I got there. The mechanical engineer, my tour guide, looked at me and said: “You are an electrical engineer, right?”
“Yes, any problem with that,” I answered jokingly?
“No nothing, but, let me pass one by you. Here we have a problem,” he started talking. “We've been struggling for 2 years now with it. Occasionally, we have light flickers in the plant. It happens suddenly and then nothing for a few days and then again. The whole plant flickers and then everything is back to normal. Do you have any suggestion what that might be,” he asked?
“I really don't know. It can be anything,” I answered. “Does it happen at night or day, high load, low load,” I inquired? Suddenly, I realized I was in an invisible world of electrical engineering.
“Well, I agree,” the plant engineer said. “It's unpredictable; anytime. We checked it with the local utility. They said that it must be something internal within our plant as they don't experience flickers on their system.”
“If I were you I would look at the main transformer since the whole plant is flickering. It may be coming from there,” I said. “Otherwise, you may have to shut down the plant and megger all the major electrical equipment, starting from the incoming transformer.”
“Hmm, I'll mention it to my electrician,” he answered.
So much for that, I thought. We continued touring and got into a rather noisy room. My guide pointed to their 2000 HP, 5 kV compressor, the biggest drive in the plant. I came closer to the compressor and spotted a drop of oil below its big cabinet on which it read: “Surge Pack.” I told him that there was no reason for the oil to be on the floor here and suggested that if he wouldn't mind we open the cabinet.
“Don't worry about the oil, I'll call our cleaning staff to clean it up,” my tour guide mentioned it somewhat embarrassed. I insisted and we opened the cabinet. Inside it I saw more oil, obviously leaking from the surge capacitor. I turned to him and said: “This may be your source of flicker. The capacitor is leaking and occasionally breaks down and creates a brief short circuit to discharge itself.”
Weeks later, he called me and thanked me for the discovery. They replaced the capacitor and, thank goodness, resolved the issue. I wrote back to him, “We were lucky to be in the room before the cleaning lady had a chance to remove the oil drop. Please don't fire that lady.”
In the invisible electrical world, you often have to be lucky.
Read this book and practice it. If you have read it and understood 80% of it, you don't need more schooling, though it would help. Not even calculus. I have nothing against math. I was pretty good at it. Nowadays, since the use of computers for power system studies, the highest level of math I have used was
This book will not make you an expert on any of these subjects. For that you will need a lot of experience and hopefully some good mentoring. But it will give you a good start and capability to discuss the subject with some confidence and ask good questions during your job interviews. With this knowledge, you can start your job from a solid base, rather than starting from nothing.
Hopefully, this book will point to you the path on how engineers think in planning and resolving the problems and the basic elements of the engineering considerations; scope of work – big picture, engineering tasks, economics (cost of equipment and production), reliability, and automation requirements.
A few more notes.
As a junior engineer, I grasped from other engineers the concept of looking at the big picture, and what matters, while leaving other things for later. These are likely to change anyway, so why bother thinking of them now. Looking at a big picture means developing a design criteria for all parts of the project right at the start, such as, determining the short circuit levels (by computer) at various plant busses, allowable voltage drops, outage
