Real-Time Control of Electric Power Systems [antikvár]

Foreword Shortly after the inception of the Brown Boveri Research Center in 1966, plans were developed to organize a series of Brown Boveri scientific symposiaj to be held at proper intervals in Baden—on a different subject each time. The. subject for a symposium should be chosen with the following requirements in mind: —It should characterize a part of a thoroughly scientific discipline; in other words, it should describe an area of scholarly study and research. —It should be of current interest in the sense that important results have recently been obtained and considerable research effort is under way in the world's scientific community. , ,, —It should bear some relation to the scientific and technological activity of the Company. These symposia will be intimately related to one of the very basic concepts which have governed the work of many modern manufacturing companies: close coupling between science and engineering. It is to this coupling that we owe the technical standard of our products and it is this coupling which we hope will be furthered by our symposia. It is often said that the important technological innovations come from the basic sciences, and the transistor is taken as a brilliant example. Indeed, the transistor is based on quantum mechanics, a thoroughly fundamental scientific structure which in turn predicts the behaviour of electrons in a crystal lattice and explains the existence of energy bands. Without a knowledge of quantum mechanics, the invention of the transistor would have been impossible. This is a model case for the following sequence of events: first, scientific discovery; then, engineering invention. Nuclear energy is another case of this kind. It is good to note that this course, although frequent, is not the only path along which technological progress takes place. In fact, the opposite sequence is quite common: first, engineering invention; then, discovery of the underlying scientific principles. The subject of the first Brown Boveri symposium which took place two years ago in 1969—fluid dynamics—is almost a model for this process. The first steam turbines were designed and successfully built by people who were only very vaguely acquainted with the scientific laws underlying their machines, and in fact