engineering

Pragasen Pillay

Pragasen Pillay is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Pragasen Pillay rather than just read about it. In short: Pragasen Pillay (born 1958) is a South African electrical engineer known for his research in power engineering and renewable energy technology. He has been a professor at Concordia University since 2008.

Key takeaways

Pragasen Pillay belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Pragasen Pillay to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Pragasen Pillay from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Pragasen Pillay (born 1958) is a South African electrical engineer known for his research in power engineering and renewable energy technology. He has been a professor at Concordia University since 2008. Before that, he was a professor at Clarkson University from 1995 to 2007. He was appointed as an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town in 2017.

Education Pillay was born in 1958. From 1978 to 1983, he studied electrical engineering at present-day University of KwaZulu-Natal. He completed a B.Eng. in 1981 at the University of Durban–Westville, supported by a scholarship from Anglo American, and then completed an M.S. in 1983 at the University of Natal, supported by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. While a student, he was a trainee engineer at Mondi SA in 1980 and an electrical engineer at the Electricity Supply Commission of South Africa in 1984. Later in 1984, he moved to Blacksburg, Virginia to pursue his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and was completed in 1987. He was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi in Virginia. In later years he was certified as a chartered electrical engineer in the United Kingdom and a registered professional engineer in Ontario, Canada.

Academic career Between 1988 and 1990, he was a lecturer at Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. In August 1990, he returned to the United States as a lecturer at the University of New Orleans, a position he held for the next five years. During that time he was associate director of the university's Center for the Application of Power and Instrumentation from 1990 to 1993 and then the director of the centre's Industry Applications and Energy Conversion programme from 1993 to 1995. On the side he did consulting work: while in Newcastle he consulted for British Gas, Sevcon, and Pakcenter, and in the United States he consulted for the Kollmorgen Corporation, Certek Corporation, Entergy Enterprises, and Powertronics. He also visited the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as research faculty in the summer of 1994. Between August 1995 and August 2007, he was the Jean Newell Distinguished Professor in Engineering at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York; he was tenured as a professor of electrical and chemical engineering in 1997. During that time he was the Danfoss Visiting Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark in 2001. In January 2008, Pillay joined Concordia University in Montréal, Canada as a professor. From 2009 to 2020, he held a Senior Industrial Research Chair co-sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Hydro-Québec. At Concordia, he is a member of the Power Engineering and Energy Research Group. He is particularly well known for his research on power engineering and renewable energy technologies. Alongside his appointment in Canada, in January 2017 he was appointed as an honorary professor in electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, where he had served as an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering since January 1999.

Honours and awards Pillay has served in various positions in committees of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and he won prize paper awards from the association in 1987 and 2003. In 2005 the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) named him as an IEEE IAS Fellow for his contributions to switched reluctance and permanent magnet motor drives. In later years he was named as an IEEE IAS Distinguished Lecturer in 2012 to 2013 and as IEE IAS Prominent Lecturer in 2014 to 2015. In 2015 he won the IAS Outstanding Achievement Award. In South Africa, he won the 2006 T. W. Kambule Award for Senior Black Researchers, presented by the South African National Science and Technology Forum and sponsored by the National Research Foundation. On 28 October 2008, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe inducted him into the Order of Mapungubwe, awarding him the prize in silver "For his excellent achievement in and contribution to the field of energy conservation." He is also a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, as well as a fellow of the United Kingdom's Institution of Engineering and Technology.

References

External links Pragasen Pillay publications indexed by Google Scholar Pragasen Pillay at Clarkson University Pragasen Pillay at Concordia University

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Pragasen Pillay

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Pragasen Pillay claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Pragasen Pillay before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Pragasen Pillay ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Pragasen Pillay

In research: Pragasen Pillay appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Pragasen Pillay in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Pragasen Pillay is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1958 births, 20th-century South African engineers, 21st-century South African engineers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Pragasen Pillay outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Pragasen Pillay in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Pragasen Pillay means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Pragasen Pillay out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pragasen Pillay in simple terms?

Why does Pragasen Pillay matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Pragasen Pillay?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Pragasen Pillay.