4/2/2015 Julia Cation
Written by Julia Cation
MechSE Professor Joseph Bentsman was awarded the 2014 Achievement Award from the International Socieyt of Automation Power Industry Division. The ISA POWID develops standards, practices, environmental awareness, and safety among those involved in the instrumentation and control of electricity production.
Their international award is given each year to one practitioner for high-impact multi-year contributions to the areas of power generation instrumentation and control, including fossil, nuclear, and renewables.
Bentsman was nominated by Alstom Power for proposing novel constrained wavelet predictive control of their multi-phase clean coal system—a performance breakthrough in a joint DOE-supported grant. He said he also received backing from Electricite de France, a member of the Electric Power Research Institute that supported his current EPRI robustification project with Southern Company.
He has been working on power plant control theory and application since 1987 under support from the U.S. Army, the National Science Foundation, Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy. His contributions to the power industry are widely recognized among his peers.
“This award will significantly benefit my research through better disseminating the successful outcomes of my EPRI, NSF, and DOE supported research across the power generation community, encouraging power generation practitioners to pursue more advanced control solutions to industry problems, and exposing me and my students to new challenges. The award also raises the stature of academia among power generation industry practitioners, since I am only the second faculty to have received this award,” said Bentsman.
He will receive the award in June at the ISA POWID Symposium, the largest annual conference in the world dedicated to automation, control systems, and instrumentation in the power industry.