President`s Column

Grounding Connection

President`s Column Farid Paul Dawalibi

Welcome to the 21st edition of the annual CDEGS Grounding and Electromagnetic Interference Conference, hosted this year by South Carolina Electric & Gas Company, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am delighted with this year’s turnout and with the number and quality of articles submitted, which will be accompanied by presentations over the course of the week. I am looking forward to a good number of productive discussions, related to novel technical investigations carried out by members of the CDEGS User’s Group and by SES. Let me acknowledge the presence, in spirit, of many of our colleagues who were not able to physically attend this year’s conference, but who have contributed so much over the years to shape our technical community: this Conference Proceedings, with all its helpful reference material, is dedicated to you. Finally, let me welcome those fine athletes, who will, I am sure, put up a valiant struggle on Monday and Wednesday evenings, during our traditional annual volleyball matches, during which they will face off with SES’s very knowledgeable and supportive volleyball team.

As you will see as you read these Proceedings, SES has been working hard not only to add functionality to the software, but also to improve your experience with the software interfaces. At the same time, SES is adopting a component-wise orientation of its software development with specialized components, using a database model, in order to provide added interface flexibility and further accelerate the software development process. You will notice, for example, that SESCAD has become a self-standing platform, able not only to create input files, but also present an interface to launch runs and create graphs and reports. You will also see that a 3D SPLITS model viewer and editor, GRSPLITS-3D, has been created, which makes reviewing and editing SPLITS models a most pleasant and productive experience. GRSPLITS-3D was created as part of a major overhaul of the Right-of-Way user interface, which is being replaced by ROWCAD, a sleek new graphical interface, which is described at length in these Proceedings.

You will also notice that the cable-modeling capabilities of HIFREQ are expanding, with pipe-type cable enclosures now available in command mode. When you run MALT and MALZ, you will feel a subtle acceleration, which becomes progressively more pronounced as you add vertical conductors to the systems you study. I suspect that when you carry out lightning shielding studies, you will be struck by the speed and growing flexibility of SESShield-3D, which has been rapidly evolving over the last year. Read on to learn more about the new software features.

On another subject, I would like to invite all of you to consider visiting SES for introductory, intermediate or advanced level customized training. Construction of our new training center should be finished this summer, complete with convenient accommodations for groups of up to seven members.

As always, I cannot emphasize enough how important are your comments on the software: what you like, what you would like to see changed and what you would like to see added. We need your input, in order to set our annual software development agenda. This conference is a major influence, but your e-mails and verbal comments are also very valuable to us.

In closing, I would like to thank everybody present at this conference for making it such a valuable forum for the exchange of knowledge and opinions on grounding, electromagnetic interference and CDEGS development. On behalf of everybody, let me thank those users who have taken the time out of very busy schedules to prepare presentations and articles for these Proceedings. We are all grateful to Mr. Ernest Middleton and South Carolina Electric & Gas Company for hosting this conference, to Mr. Garthae (Skip) Williams, this year’s user’s group chairman, and again to Mr. Ernest Middleton, this year’s treasurer, for their hard work. Finally, let me underline SES’s enduring gratitude to YOU, our legion of loyal users, who have renewed technical support from SES, year after year, thus keeping SES in touch with your needs and financially sustaining the R&D that goes into delivering to you the world’s most advanced power system grounding and electromagnetic compatibility software, along with technical support from internationally recognized experts, whose priority it is to help you when you need them.

ISSUE

November

2011