Engineering energy

NC State electrical engineering students have always spent a lot of time in the lab.

In the top photo, Dr. Wilhelm F. Gauster, professor of electrical engineering, performs a rod-gap experiment with a student in the College’s High Voltage Laboratory in 1952.

Started under the leadership of Engineering Dean J. Harold Lampe and overseen by Gauster and Dr. Cornelius Godfrey Brennecke, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1945 to 1954, the lab was located in the lower level of the southwest corner of Riddick Engineering Laboratories on North Campus.

In the bottom photo, students work in a lab on the ground floor of the Keystone Science Center on the university’s Centennial Campus. The one-megawatt lab is part of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management – FREEDM – Systems Center, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) led by NC State that is developing the next-generation smart grid that works seamlessly with renewable energy technologies.

Learn more about FREEDM and the NSF Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST), the other ERC led by NC State that is developing wearable health systems powered by the human body. Both centers are fresh off positive site visits by NSF officials this spring and are making advances that will change the way our national energy grid works and empower consumers to take charge of their own health.

NC State is the only university in the country to lead two ERCs simultaneously and one of only two schools (along with Carnegie-Mellon University) to ever be awarded the lead role for three Centers.

Return to contents or download the Fall/Winter 2015 NC State Engineering magazine.