From the editors´ desk

The first article in this issue is ???Promoting Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics of Electrical Insulation in Undergraduate Capstone Graduation Projects??? by Ayman El-Hag from the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. In many universities worldwide, students in electrical engineering are required, in order to complete their degrees, to work in groups on graduation (capstone) projects. Undergraduates tend to select projects related to state-of-the-art technology and to shy away from projects related to high-voltage engineering. However, with the emergence of smart grid, power-system engineering is currently being modernized by the inclusion of several several technologies, e.g., communications, information technology, sensors, and data mining. High-voltage engineering, as part of power engineering, could be presented as an area affected by those technologies, and thus be made more attractive to undergraduate students. In the article, four capstone graduation projects presented at the American University of Sharjah in the last nine years are described, each related to condition monitoring and diagnostics of electrical insulation. They required minimum high-voltage infrastructure, and hence were implemented at modest cost. Of the four, two did not involve high-voltage power supplies. These were concerned with (a) automatic classification of the surface condition of polymer insulators, and (b) detection of defects in polymer insulators using near-field microwave nondestructive testing. The skills that the students developed in carrying out (a) included basic digital image processing and the use of artificial intelligence systems, while in (b) they developed an understanding of the properties of microwave radiation and the use of waveguides.