Hey everyone -

We’ve been super busy the last several weeks, but we finally have some pictures to share from our trip to France and Italy. We will try to label the pictures in the next several days, so check back to get more info on our trip. You will see pictures that include -

- the major sights we saw in Paris
- a day trip to Monet’s garden and the countryside that we biked through to get there
- a day trip to Mt. St. Micheal
- the city of Venice and the island of Murano
- the city of Padova, including Europe’s second biggest city square
- the Dolomite mountains and the city of Cortina

Enjoy, and check back in several days for more info. See the gallery here.

Please note: the gallery will open in a new window.  You can click on any picture to make it bigger and to start the slide show.

We just wanted to let all of our faithful readers know that we have returned from an amazing European vacation. We spent from July 8th to July 19th visiting two of the greatest regions in Europe. The first half of the trip was spent in Paris, France and the surrounding Normandy region and the second half of the trip was spent in Venice, Italy and the surrounding Veneto region. All in all this was an absolutely amazing vacation and we have so many stories and pictures to share with every one.

As you can imagine, in that amount of time we saw an unbelievable amount of stuff and took about 1200 pictures. Needless to say that it will take us some time to digest all of this and to process the pictures. So, please be patient and stay tuned for what we hope to be some wonderful blog postings.

One of my great and longtime friends has decided to post his music on myspace for all of the world to hear. Mason has been a close friend of mine for many years now and is originally from the same hometown as I am. Mason plays the guitar and sings as well as writes his own music. On ocassion he might do a cover song of one of his favorites.

Please check out his myspace page where he has about 6 songs posted that you can listen to. Get to his page by clicking HERE.

We had one of the best hiking experiences of our lives in the Dvorefjell National Park, near Oppdal, Norway. We took a 1.5 hour train from Trondheim and our guide met us at the station. From there, we drove about half an hour to the park. We hiked up to 1100 above sea level and saw nearly 30 musk ox. The musk ox are very cool - but very odd - looking animals that are closely related to goats, but weigh in at around 1100 pounds. Check out the musk ox and gorgeous scenery.

View the gallery here

During the 9 days my dad was here, we fit in many Norwegian adventures! In the post, I will include some of the highlights of the trip.

We started out in Trondheim and explored the city and walked along the Trondheim fjord.

It was a little rainy, but a beautiful walk. We also stopped at the Spoonhuset for dessert waffles!

We spent 4 days in the Arctic Circle, in the town of Alta. We loved being in the Arctic Circle - it was so beautiful. The landscape is much more barren and most plants are very low to the ground. On our first day, we went to the Alta Rock Carvings. I loved seeing the ancient rock carvings, some of which are more than 6000 years old. While much of their meaning is a mystery, they seem to be part of religious ceremonies, and they often took place at special points where it was perceived human lives and godly lives intersected (and therefore humans could communicate with gods) rather than around the area a group of people lived.

It was absolutely pouring rain when we were here. We both had raincoats, but we still walked away pretty drenched. However, this really made it so we had the park almost to ourselves - despite the 4 tour buses in the parking lot! This is a UNESCO heritage site and so many people try to visit.

On our second day in Alta, we went on an amazing river boat ride. This was not a lazy, meandering ride down the river, but a speedy boat ride cutting through rapids, with amazing scenery, including cliffs and dozens of waterfalls. This was probably my favorite part of our trip! We also found out that once a summer, the King of Norway goes on a private fishing tour in the very boat we were in!

There were countless waterfalls - enhanced by the very rainstorm that drenched us the day before! Our boat guide said that there was so much rain from that storm that he was seeing waterfalls he had never seen before.

Throughout the ride, we had beautiful scenery - mountains, rugged and rocky cliffs, and hills with trees.

Can you see the face?

The boat

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Another highlight of the trip was hiking up Mt. Komsa. The mountain itself was very beautiful and had the very arctic - looking landscape, with sparse trees and low to the ground plants. Plus, throughout the hike we had beautiful views of many other mountains and the Alta fjord.

The picture below is on Lille Komsa (Little Komsa) and if you compare this picture to pictures of Mt. Komsa, you’ll see a difference in the scarcity of trees and vegetation.

As we went up the mountain, we saw rocks that were covered in lichen.

How it looked towards the top of Mt. Komsa.

We also went on several great hikes throughout Alta, spent another several days in Trondheim and went to see Muskox. We did much more than I have posted here.

I will make another post about the muskox when I get the pictures processed from Adam. This post is just an overview of some of the highlights from the first part of the trip. We had such a great time! I am so glad that my dad came here and we were able to see so many cool things in Norway!

Research, research, research… it is whats paying my bills this summer and it’s also something that we don’t do enough of in the USA. Karen and I have roughly six weeks left in Norway so I thought I would give everyone a little update on the things I have been working on since I started.

When I first started at work this summer I was focusing on continuing a project I started during the spring semester at MTU. This project was work on the single pole tripping and reclosing that I had described in an earlier post (click here for the old post). In 2005 a previous master’s student at MTU had written code for a program called Alternative Transients Program (ATP) to more topologically correctly model a transformer and transformer core. The project I had been working on during the spring semester was to create/update models of the same power system using a program called ATPDraw. ATPDraw is basically a higher level graphical programming language for ATP. ATPDraw provides a user interface that allows easier programing and implementation of models based on something that would be similar to a cad package. By this I mean you can visually see symbols and graphics to do the programming instead of just writing text lines of computer code. The newest versions of ATPDraw contain many new models, features, and updates over the programs used in 2005 by the other masters student. So, my project (working with 2 other students) was to create, update, and correct the models built by the student in 2005 using the latest ATPDraw version. We had those models built, partially benchmarked, and ready to roll by the time the spring semester was over.

This leads into my first task here at NTNU this summer. I wanted to see how the results compared from the original hand-coded models to the new models we had built. The purpose was to show that although we made changes, corrections, and updates the older models still provided valid results and that the conclusions and suggestions made based on those results were still OK and valid. The main problem in doing this was to learn how to run the old files in the new software. This took me a while to figure out but luckily once I realized how to do it things went rather smoothly. These old files are also not as fast to run and require a larger amount of tedious work to run the number of simulations and then tabulate the results. I’m not sure on the exact number of days or hours that I spent working on this part but it did fill a good chunk of my time for the first few weeks.

After I got all of the files ran it was time to tabulate some results and see how everything compared. In short, everything matched up really well. Across all of the cases the largest difference I saw was about 6.3% and that was just for one measurement in one case. All of the other measurements in the other cases were typically around 2% or much less. This is a very good match considering we made several updates, corrections, and small improvements. This shows that the original work provided valid results that are still usable and models that can be used in future projects if needed. Although, in all likely hood any future work would be done with our newer models and the latest version of the program.

After this project was done and I had a chance to present my results to my adviser it was time to move onto some new work. During the weeks leading up to this point my adviser, Nils (the other MTU student), Nicola (PHD student at NTNU), Hans (the professor we are working with here), and myself had been meeting to discuss the work that we needed to perform in the lab to get things rolling with the papers we want to write. Since I was done with my first project and Nils had also completed work on a separate project related to ATPDraw modeling of Static Var Compensators (SVCs) it was time to move forward with the lab work. We took a couple of days just to digest all of the information from the previous meetings, locate all needed testing equipment, and setup everything up for the tests.

For the first cases of study we choose to use a 22kVA single phase isolation transformer. This allows us to have a simple “base case” and then launch into more complex 3 phase transformers. The tests we were to perform are known as no load tests. This means that the low voltage side of the transformer is connected to the voltage source and nothing is connected to the high voltage side - hence the “no load”. In the case of this transformer both sides of the transformer are at the same voltage (its an isolation transformer) so we connected the voltage source to the terminals with the winding closest to the core material.

A total of 8 different tests were ran on the transformer each with varying levels of input impedance. This input impedance ranged from 9-24 Ohms and was provided by two different methods. First we used a resistive load cart and then we used a reactor (inductor). We did this because we wanted to look at data from each way of doing it. For each level of added impedance we also energized the transformer at different voltage levels ranging from 50% to about 130% excitation.

It took about a week or a little more to setup and run all of the tests. After the data was collected it was then time to do some post processing to see what it all meant. Nicola, the PHD student here, already had some initial programs written in MATLAB to do some of the first processing. He was able to quickly process the data so we could take a look at what was happening. His results showed how the magnetization curves were differing based on the distortion level of the voltage which in turn is tied to amount of added input impedance. The higher the input impedance the more the voltage is distorted. This is what we were expecting to see. He also showed that some routines written previously by my adviser worked for this application as well. After his results it was time for us go a step further and take a look at the exact harmonic content of the data we gathered.

Nils and I partnered up and wrote a routine to do this in MATLAB using Fast Fourier Analysis (FFT). MATLAB stands for Matrix Laboratory and is a very useful engineering program. Between the 2 of us this took a few days to get to work properly but we are now able to see the exact frequency content of the voltage waveform used to energize the transformer. This was not exactly an easy task due to the way the original data was required. Without getting into the exact details I will just say that there was a lot of manipulation of the data that needed to be done first before the final results could be calculated. This routine returns the exact frequency, magnitude, and angle of each voltage harmonic present in the applied waveform. In the last few days I worked on adding some additional functionality which allows us to calculate and see some other properties that both the IEEE and IEC standards for transformer no load testings are concerned with. All of the results will be used to write our journal papers and make our case for the needed changes.

So, those are the basics and highlights of what I have been doing so far this summer. It will be interesting to see what I end up working on during my remaining time here but I suspect it will more geared towards the completion of the first journal paper. Comprehensively compiling test results, creating circuit diagrams for our test setup, and writting/reviewing written material for the paper. Stay tuned for more updates and if you have any questions or want clarification on anything written here please don’t hesitate to ask. Leave a comment or shoot me an email.

We have finally gotten the rest of the pictures from our Bergen trip downloaded onto our computers and posted into galleries. There are two completely new albums for you to check out so please visit the links provided below to see the new pictures.

View pictures from the Norway in a Nutshell tour in Gallery #4 here

View pictures from the top of Mount Fløyen in Gallery #5 here

Enjoy and leave comments for us if you feel inspired

We had a wonderful visit to the city of Bergen last week. We decided to go to Bergen because we wanted to do the Norway in a Nutshell tour and because Bergen is one of the top cities in Norway to visit. We flew from Trondheim to Bergen, taking about 1 hour to get there. When we arrived in Bergen, we went to the city centre and bought our tickets for Norway in a Nutshell at the tourist info centre.

We found our way to the hotel, which was a bit out of the way, and therefore more budget friendly, and then we took the funicular up to the Mount Floyen. View Gallery #1  here. (Note: because we have such a large volume of pictures, we are using a different site to host our galleries for the Bergen trip. Use the slideshow function or ‘next’/'previous’ arrows to view photos).

The next day, we went on the Norway in a Nutshell Tour, Bergen Round Trip. We caught a train at 8:30 in the morning and returned to Bergen at about 9:00 at night. We went to Myrdal, Voss, the Flam Railway, on a fjord cruise, and took a bus and train back to Bergen. It was breathtaking - especially the Flam Railway and the fjord tour. View Gallery #2  here.

On our last day in Bergen, we explored the wharf, the fish market, took a harbour cruise, and enjoyed walking around this historic town. See gallery # 3 here.

Tomorrow my dad  gets into Trondheim and we have 9 days of Norwegian adventures planned! We’ll start by spending a day in Trondheim, and then we are heading up to the Arctic Circle. This part of Norway is called Finnmark or Norwegian Lapland. We’ll stay in Alta, where we plan on taking hiking, taking a boat ride to bird mountain, seeing ancient rock carvings, and much more. We also have the option of taking a ferry to Hammerfest and the North Cape.

After our trip up north, we’ll head back to Trondheim. Adam and I will show Dad the fjord, the campus where Adam is working and the other campus where I’ll be taking a language course, and all the great sites in Trondheim, such as old town, the wharf areas, and the cathedral.

We are all going on a day trip to Oppdal, where we will go on a Musk Ox hike with a guide. I can’t wait for him to get here! — Karen

Here is a visual of our adventures:

We have been slow to post lately due to some technical glitches. Our good friend and super-geek Gowtham fixed our problems and we are up and running again. Thanks, G! We’ll post some pictures from our Bergen trip soon, but in the mean time, catch your daily dose of beautiful photography at Gowtham’s website here.