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 Charles Concordia
(1908 - 2003)
Charles Concordia was
born on June 20,
1908, and grew up in Schenectady,
New York. His father taught piano and other instruments, and classical
music remained an interest of Concordia's to his death. His originality
and
self-confidence showed up early.
In 1926, an honor student excelling in physics, he went straight from
high school to the General Electric Co., also in Schenectady, where he
worked
on early television research. Eight years later, in 1934, he graduated
from the company's Advanced Engineering Program.
The first of his many
technical
inventions was a detector
of cracks in rails, which he developed in GE's General Engineering
Laboratory. Based on magnetic field measurements, his technique did
away with the need to clean the rail beforehand - a prerequisite of the
prevailing technique, which employed a Kelvin bridge for measuring the
rail's relatively low electrical resistance.
Concordia began focusing
on systems
engineering and electric utility
work, and became GE's consultant to public utilities,
advising on system protection and reliability. Dr. Concordia made
significant
advances in several fields of engineering while at General Electric
from
1926 until 1973. During World War II Concordia worked on generators and
turbines for naval destroyer propulsion, researched superchargers for
airplanes,
and helped develop ships' electrical drives. In the 1940s he chaired
AIEE's
subcommittee on large-scale computing devices and continued his
consulting
work after the war. In the 1940s, Dr. Concordia pioneered the idea that
synchronous machines' voltage-regulator characteristics affect their
stability,
which is now widely accepted. His 1944 paper "Steady State Stability of
Synchronous Machines
as Affected by Voltage-Regulator Characteristics," in the Transactions
of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, has been one
of the
most cited in the field. His 1951 book Synchronous Machines –Theory and
Performance is still cited frequently.
All aspects
of electric
power systems have gained from his creativity,
including turbine and generator design and performance, load behavior
under
normal and disturbance conditions, system control and protection, and
analysis
of power blackouts. His 130-plus technical papers
and six patents related to electric power system stability, speed
governing and tie-line power
and frequency control, design of power systems for maximum service
reliability,
computing machines, centrifugal compressors, and wind tunnel fan
drives. He excelled in the
application of digital computers to power engineering and other
engineering
disciplines. He was among the dozen founders of the Association
for
Computing Machinery in 1947, and the first chairman of the American
Institute
of Electrical Engineers' Computer Committee, a forerunner of the IEEE
Computer
Society.
In 1971,
he was awarded a
Doctor of Science from Union College, and he later received
an honorary D.Sc. from the Iowa State University. Over his lifetime,
Charles Concordia received honors and awards including the Charles A
Coffin Award for contributions
to the analysis of wind tunnel electric drives; Lamme Medal (1961,
AIEE)
for achievement in the development of electrical machinery; Steinmetz
Award
(General Electric, 1973) for technical achievement; Philip Sporn Award
(Conférence International des Grandes Réseaux Electriques
[CIGRE], 1989) for career contributions to the advancement of the
concept
of system integration in the theory, design, and operation of large
high-voltage
electric power systems; Centennial Medal (IEEE, 1984) for contributions
to the electric power discipline; Power-Life Award (IEEE Power
Engineering
Society, 1992) for contributions to the harmonious development of man
and
his environment. At age 91 he was the recipient of the 1999 IEEE Medal
of Honor “For
outstanding contributions in the area of Power Systems Dynamics which
resulted
in substantial improvements in planning, operation, and security of
extended
power systems.”
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