The Education and Student Activities Committee (ESAC) seeks to foster EMC education at both the academic and professional levels. This was a year of transition that saw a new chairman installed – Tom Jerse (The Citadel) with Randy Jost (Utah State University) serving as vice-chair and Larry Cohen (Naval Research Labs) continuing as secretary. At our annual meeting held during the Austin Symposium, we reviewed and discussed ways to enhance our contribution in the various areas of our charter.
iNARTE Activities
The International Association for Radio, Telecommunication, and Electromagnetics (iNARTE) is the authority for certifying EMC engineers and technicians. Each year, iNARTE offers the opportunity to take the qualifying exam during the annual EMC Symposium with a tutorial session on Monday and the exam on Friday of the Symposium week. At the ESAC meeting, Brian Lawrence, iNARTE executive director, announced the establishment of Associate Programs that will make available Associate Engineer Certificates and Associate Technician Certificates. Because nine years of engineering work are required to achieve full certification as an EMC engineer, iNARTE is now enabling graduates of a four-year bachelor degree program and whose studies have included an EMC, ESD, or product safety engineering course to obtain Associate Engineering status. This entry level enables them to demonstrate their interest in the field until they have worked a sufficient number of years to achieve full certification. A similar Associate Technician Certificate is now available to graduates of two-year diploma programs. (See the article on iNARTE on page 98 of this Newsletter.)
EMC Experiments Manual
For many years ESAC has maintained a manual of original EMC experiments (available at https://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/edu/exper.htm). Ed Wheeler (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) continues to lead this effort. He is in the process of compiling additional experiments that he has solicited. New experiments are always welcome, and instructions for submitting them can be found on the link given above.
PHOTOS BY KEN WYATT |
|
|
Gang Feng from the Missouri University of Science and Technology received the Leo L. Beranek Anechoic Chamber
Student Travel Grant to attend the Symposium and present
his paper “Impedance of an Infinitely Large
Parallel-Plane Pair and its Applications in Engineering Modeling.”
The paper was co-authored
with his colleague, student
A.R. Chada (not pictured). |
Xiaomin Duan, student author from the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, received the Best Student Symposium Paper Award for his paper titled “EM Emission of Differential Signals Across Printed Circuit Boards in the GHz Range.” |
University Grant
The University Grant Committee reported making two awards for the development of original courses in EMC in 2008: $10,000 went to Wuhan University of Technology in China for a course authored by Professor Xiaoying Xu and $5,000 went to the University of Split in Croatia for a course developed by Professor Antonio Sarolic. A Call for Proposals for the 2009 University Grant was issued on September 1 with the awardee to be declared at the beginning of December. The mission of the University Grant Committee is to identify universities around the world with an instructor who has an interest in EMC education and provide assistance in developing a course. All professors considering such a course are invited to visit the grant website at https://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/committees/education/univ_grant/index.html
Student Papers
The annual student paper contest offers an opportunity for students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to convey the results of their research to the EMC community. It further introduces them to the EMC Society and highlights EMC as fertile ground for research and a career. This year one of the largest numbers of student papers ever submitted for consideration was received, requiring a significant effort by the judges. The Best Student Paper chosen was titled “EM Emission of Differential Signals across Connected Printed Circuit Boards in the GHz Range” by Xiaomin Duan, Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg, Hamburg, Germany. The co-authors were H.D. Bruens, C. Schuster and B. Archambeault. The author of a second paper, “Impedance of an Infinitely Large Parallel-plane Pair and its Applications in Engineering Modeling” by Arun Reddy Chada, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, United States (with co-authors Y. Zhang, G. Feng, J.L. Drewniak, and J. Fan) was chosen to receive the Leo L. Beranek Anechoic Chamber Student Travel Grant to attend the Austin Symposium. Students are invited to enter a paper in next year’s contest. The Call for Papers for the 2010 Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale is now available on the website, www.emc2010.org, with a section on the submittal of student papers.
Tutorials
The ESAC traditionally sponsors and presents a full-day EMC Fundamentals Tutorial at each EMC Symposium, and this year was no exception. The offering this year was organized by Daryl Beetner of the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The tutorial began with a presentation on Basic Electromagnetics by Andy Marvin (University of York), followed by Transmission Line Fundamentals given by Ed Wheeler (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). The afternoon session commenced with EMI-EMC Right the First Time: Planning, Modeling, and Measurement in Design and Development by Roy Leventhal (Leventhal Design & Communications). The final two sessions of the tutorial were The Return Current Path by Daryl Beetner and Introduction to Numerical Methods in Electromagnetics from Qiubo Ye (CRC Canada). ESAC appreciates the efforts of all these presenters in making this well-attended tutorial a success.
Live Demonstrations at the Symposium
For the 17th consecutive year, hardware and software demonstrations were presented at the Symposium in the Exhibit Hall. For the Austin Symposium, Colin Brench and Michael Vrbanac took the initiative to solicit, review, and organize the live presentations. Nine hardware and nine computer demonstrations were arranged to illustrate effective EMC methods and practices. The hardware experiments addressed EMI issues such as PCB radiation, grounding and shielding strategies for crosstalk reduction, and spectral analysis techniques. The computer demonstrations highlighted different modeling approaches of basic EMC problems to show how various numerical methods can be used to solve them.
K-12 Outreach
ESAC has been exploring possible avenues of introducing basic concepts of EMC to younger students at the secondary and even primary-level. A group to be led by Elya Joffe will be examining various alternatives. The group plans to leverage previous work in this area by ESAC members who have presented to pre-college students the idea of electromagnetic interference and why it needs to be controlled.
The ESAC Goal
ESAC strives to enhance the field of EMC by encouraging as many educational activities as practical. In particular, we have focused on educating students and engineers who are newer to the field. ESAC membership is open to anyone with an interest in EMC education and participation is warmly welcomed. The more people involved in spreading EMC knowledge, the more we can accomplish.
Please contact Tom Jerse at jerset@citadel.edu for more information about the Education and Student Activities Committee. EMC
Education and Student 
