Iron Range Engineering

This semester at IRE a design team got to do a unique project. Saginaw Power and Automation is a startup company based in Saginaw MN. They provided the project of doing an arc flash analysis on their newly bought building. The unique part about this project was that it was not a design project but rather a process. The team instead of designing a system to perform a task was given a set procedure to learn and perform. To begin the team had to do in depth research on the topic of arc flash analysis and generally apply it because the building was not yet open. After the building was open two weeks before spring break the team could finally enter and start collecting data and stop working on the hypothetical. Next was the tricky part, the team had to understanding and performing the analysis. Eventually, with some help from their mentor and client the team managed to correctly perform this task and understand what it was they were doing. This project was very rewarding because many new concepts had to be learned in order to achieve the desired results. It is also very rewarding because there are not many electrical engineers around northern Minnesota that can perform an arc flash analysis.