Conferences

An important part in the researcher's profesional life is the asistance to conferences. A lot of diferent people that come from diferent countries, talk about diferent issues, exchange diferent ideas; and, of course drink, eat and buy souvenirs share his time for 3 or four days. This month I have the rare oportunity to atend two conferences, The PES general meeting and the ISIE conference.

The PES general meeting is a huge conference where a lot of people talking about distribution, power delivery and renewable energy sources. In this conference, the more interesting part were the panels where industry people and academic people talk about a particular issue.

Two issues had received my particular attention: Eolic energy and reliability in distribution networks. After to hear a lot of presentations about new topologies and controll schemas, I want to remark the idea presented by a vesta manager: The trend is to move the win turbines to syncronous machines fed completely by an voltage source AC drive. This declaration send a lot of works to the wastebasket. A not so funny example about the diference betwen theoretical and practical developes of technology. On other hand, it is easy to understand how the difference in the countries' laws determine the diferent researchs in quality power delivery. Countries with restrictive legislation, that include refunds to customers in case of blackouts involves a lot of efforts in avoid fails. For example in Finland the research include optimal routing of wires in forests and finaly, to avoid blackouts caused by snow-storms a lot of lines move for air lines to underground lines.

Rodrigo Benavides, Dr(c) from Darmstad University of Technology and Mauricio Rottella from ABB switzerland Ltd. Chile Sales Manager

The ISIE is a medium size conference, only for specialists in power electronics. The issues basicaly involving new topologies, control system and solutions for specific applications. No more than a hundred academics and industry people attend this conference, for students, is the oportunity to meet this people and ask important questions. We, the LCDA, presents 3 papers in the conference, one of them, Jorge Sommer's paper won the price for the best presentation in its own session. Greetings Jorge. A special note is for Maria Triaggianese, This women works in parallel structures, close to my research,but using voltage source structures, and thrust in me, she has a huge comprenssion on the complete system, her fragile body is the envelope for a strong brain. Talking with her I note a good knowledge in power, control and mathematical models. Another work that had called my attention was presented for people of the Max Plank institute. The german proffesor talks about the helias fusion reactor, basically current sources are used for charge or discharge superconductive coils that warm and provides a rotor force for the plasma enclosured inside the fusion reactor. In his own words "this is not research for today, is research for twenty years more".

Finally my advice for chilean electrical graduate students, make the effort to assist to this international meetings, the ideas exchange is strong and the posibility to start with a new research line is higher.