Meet Educator Dr. Tom Van Doren
President, Van Doren Company
President = “chief lackey”, Van Doren Company, my wife Lana is the real boss of the company. I have been happily married to my ‘angel’ for over 51 years!
ICM: What is your professional background?
Tom: I received BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1962, 1963, and 1969 respectively. The main thing that I learned while obtaining the PhD degree was persistence will beat intelligence nearly every time. I served two years as a young second lieutenant with the US Army Security Agency from 1963-1965. While in the Army I realized how little I knew compared to the gray-haired senior sergeants. I worked for Collins Radio Company as a microwave engineer in Dallas, TX from 1965-1967.
During that time I was taught by some patient, experienced microwave engineers what inductance was and I discovered from some electrical safety engineers what electrical grounding was all about. I have been teaching the concepts of inductance and grounding in my short courses for the past 28 years. I never suspected then that I would become a multi-millionaire by teaching what I learned about those two concepts. I began my college teaching career with the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1969. During my first decade of teaching, I spent 9 summers in the 1970s working for the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, CA on advanced missile radar designs. There, I learned to combine my theoretical PhD education with the practical experience needed to make electronics work reliably over wide temperature and pressure ranges. On many occasions the experienced senior technicians gently “put me in my place” by showing me that I really didn’t know as much about engineering as I thought I did.
I am one of the founding members of the Missouri S&T EMC Laboratory. Currently, 8 US and 9 foreign corporations are sponsoring 23 different EMC related research projects at the EMC Laboratory. We have 26 graduate students, 5 research faculty, 5 tenured faculty and about $1.5M annual budget.
I have received two outstanding teacher awards from Missouri S&T, the Richard R. Stoddard award from the IEEE EMC Society for contributions to EMC technology and education, and I am a Life Fellow of the IEEE and Honored Life member of the EMC Society.
ICM: Why do you teach electromagnetic compatibility short courses?
Tom: In the early 1980s, I recognized that working engineers and technicians needed some help to diagnose and reduce their electrical interference problems. I developed a 2-day short course titled “Grounding and Shielding of Electronic Systems”. This course explained and demonstrated the key concepts involved with making equipment electromagnetically compatible. Even though I was a university faculty member who was familiar with complicated electromagnetic theory, in my short course I tried to explain the key concepts in a way that would be understood by and useful to design engineers and technicians. I must have succeeded because over the past 28 years more than 18,000 people from 110 companies and 15 countries have attended my short course presentations.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Tom:
- Treat an electrical signal as a current that requires careful routing of the outgoing and returning paths.
- Route a current such that the ‘geometrical’ centroid of its outgoing path is coincident with the ‘geometrical’ centroid of its return path.
- Every current, signal or noise, eventually returns to its source, not to ground.
- Sinusoidal steady-state currents take the path of least impedance, not least resistance.
- Self-inductance is a property of a complete current path, not a property of a single wire.
- The reasons for grounding are to reduce voltage differences that might cause an electrical safety problem or an electrical interference problem.
- A signal routing connection is intended to carry current, but a signal grounding connection should carry negligible signal current.
- Electrical noise problems can be predicted, diagnosed, and reduced by understanding the four electrical energy coupling mechanisms—conducted current coupling; magnetic field coupling; electric field coupling; and, electromagnetic wave coupling.
Open enrollment classes scheduled for 2012:
“Grounding & Shielding of Electronic Systems” (How to Diagnose and Solve Electromagnetic Interference and Signal Integrity Problems)
March 1-2 at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater, OK.
Details about the course in Stillwater, OK can be found at http://gs-course.okstate.edu
March 28-29 at University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL).
Details about the course in St. Louis, MO can be found at http://dce.mst.edu/noncredit/facetoface/Grounding_and_Shielding_St_Louis.html
