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Power Lines, Electric Fields, and Dust Devils on Mars Date: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 Time: 5:30 – 7:00 pm (Pizza and soft drinks will be provided.) Location: WSU Tri-Cities Campus, West Building room 138 Directions: http://www.tricity.wsu.edu/student-affairs/visit.htm Presenter: Harold Kirkham, Staff Scientist, Energy Technology Development Group in PNNL, Richland, WA Description – Power lines are hazardous to your health, or so they said. Living near a power line causes cancer. Workers on high voltage lines suffer from impotence. Or so it was alleged, thirty years ago. With stories like this going around, some real information and some real understanding seemed to be needed. The Department of Energy, the Electric Power Research Institute and several utilities got involved. Years have been spent doing research. (And no, the allegations are not true.) An important part of the research was the measurement of the fields involved – in particular the electric field. The best instruments were those designed and made for DOE at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, by a team led by Harold Kirkham. These instruments were small and electrically isolated, and used advanced stuff like hybrid ICs, optical power, and fiber optics. In this talk, Harold will discuss the measurement problems (and some solutions) and describe a new and improved E-field instrument designed and made at the University of Michigan. He will discuss the difficulties of making an instrument to go to Mars (the fourth rock from the Sun), and give results from some unexpected applications of the instruments – in particular, the measurement of the electric fields associated with dust devils. Biography – Harold Kirkham received the BSc degree and the MSc degree from the University of Aston, Birmingham, in the U.K. After working with the Edison Electric Institute in Philadelphia for a while, he received the PhD degree from Drexel University in 1973. From 1963 to 1968 he was with Midlands Electricity Board, a distribution utility. After his PhD he was with American Electric Power, in New York and then at their UHV station in Indiana. He was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA, from 1979 until 2009, in a variety of positions. For several years he managed a DOE-funded project on communications and control in the electric power system, concerned largely with the integration of distributed generation, distribution automation, and power system measurements. Later he was manager of the NEPTUNE power project, aimed at delivering power via MV cable to science locations on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. (Google “Neptune Canada” to see an outcome.) In 2009 he moved to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to pursue work on sustainable energy and the smart grid. Since joining PNNL he has been involved in a number of projects, and is presently the system engineer on the Renewables Integration Model. His research interests include both power and measurements. Dr. Kirkham is a Fellow of the IEEE and Past-Chair of the IEEE Power Engineering Society’s Instrumentation and Measurements Committee. Please RSVP to Frank Tuffner, IEEE Power and Energy Society Richland Chapter Secretary Email:
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, phone: 509-372-6799, by April 27th. Click here for the flyer of the event. |
