Power engineering

Over the next two centuries a number of important discoveries were made including the incandescent light bulb and the voltaic pile.

[1][2] Probably the greatest discovery with respect to power engineering came from Michael Faraday who in 1831 discovered that a change in magnetic flux induces an electromotive force in a loop of wire—a principle known as electromagnetic induction that helps explain how generators and transformers work.

[7] That same year in London Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs demonstrated the first transformer suitable for use in a real power system.

Following the demonstration George Westinghouse, an American entrepreneur, imported a number of the transformers along with a Siemens generator and set his engineers to experimenting with them in the hopes of improving them for use in a commercial power system.

Using this knowledge he built the world's first practical transformer based alternating current power system at Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1886.

[9][10] In 1885 the Italian physicist and electrical engineer Galileo Ferraris demonstrated an induction motor and in 1887 and 1888 the Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla filed a range of patents related to power systems including one for a practical two-phase induction motor[11][12] which Westinghouse licensed for his AC system.

1 generating station at Niagara Falls began transmitting three-phase alternating current power to Buffalo at 11 kV.

In 1936 the first commercial high-voltage direct current (HVDC) line using mercury-arc valves was built between Schenectady and Mechanicville, New York.

[19] SF6 is a far superior dielectric to air and, in recent times, its use has been extended to produce far more compact switching equipment (known as switchgear) and transformers.

For example, the development of computers meant load flow studies could be run more efficiently allowing for much better planning of power systems.

Advances in information technology and telecommunication also allowed for much better remote control of the power system's switchgear and generators.

Power Engineering deals with the generation, transmission, distribution and utilization of electricity as well as the design of a range of related devices.