Vince Ginter was the first employee hired by New Energy in 2004 after his graduation from the University of Calgary with a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering. Vince has been instrumental, as have all of our employees, in the continued success of the company and our products. In 2007 Vince returned to the University of Calgary for a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering while continuing to work full time for New Energy.

Coincidently, Vince’s area of study was on control systems for hydrokinetic power generation systems which matched extremely well with New Energy’s business. Through the undertaking of his thesis, titled Robust Gain Scheduled Control of a Hydrokinetic Turbine, Vince developed an H_∞ linear parameter varying controller based on a physical model of the EnCurrent Turbine and iterative simulation based testing. The final version of the controller was field tested on a 5 kW Turbine. Vince published his thesis on June 4, 2009 under the guidance of Dr. Jeff Pieper, his Thesis Advisor.

In October Dr. Pieper presented two papers based on Vince’s thesis to the IEEE Canada Electrical Power and Energy Conference 2009 – Sustainable/Renewable Energy Systems and Technologies. These papers, both available on our website, cover the design (Robust Gain Scheduled Control Design) and testing (Robust Gain Scheduled Control Testing) of the control which Vince developed for his thesis. A consolidated paper, which has been submitted to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, is also available (Robust Gain Scheduled Control of a Hydrokinetic Turbine).

Vince was granted his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Mechatronics on November 12, 2009 – much to the relief and celebration of his wife and children. The picture above includes Vince, on the right, and Dr. Pieper.