Dr. Werner
Leonhard
1992 William E. Newell Power
Electronics Award Recipient
The William E. Newell Power Electronics Award for 1992 was presented to Dr. Werner Leonhard at the Awards Banquet at APEC '92 in Toledo, Spain. Dr. Leonhard is Professor of Control Engineering at the Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Germany.Dr. Leonhard received his undergraduate and graduate education at the Technical Hochschule Stuttgart, receiving the Dr.Ing. degree in 1954. He first worked in the USA for Westinghouse on the development of the Load-o-Matic ac drive and on the Cypak, an early magnetic-based precursor of the programmable logic controller. In 1959 he joined Siemens-Schuckert-Werke in Erlangen, West Germany, where he made numerous contributions to the design of transistorized multiloop drive control systems and to the first solid-state computer-controlled rolling mill drives.
In 1963 Dr. Leonhard joined the Technische Universitat Braunschweig as Professor of Control Engineering. At Braunschweig Professor Leonhard has continued his innovative work in solid-state industrial drives. Together with his students, which number over sixty Dr. Ing. graduates, he has been responsible for both introducing and popularizing the principle of field orientation of induction motor drives, a control concept that has made practical the high- performance ac motor drive systems of today. His work on ac motor field-oriented control first using microprocessors and later digital signal processors dramatically demonstrated to manufacturers the practicality of low-cost high-performance motor control. Professor Leonhard's book, Control of Electrical Drives is widely considered the most important recent text on ac motor control.
Professor Leonhard has served as head of the Electrical Engineering Department and as Dean of Engineering at Braunschweig, and is a member of the Senate Committee of the Deutche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Source: IEEE Power Electronics Society News Letter, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1993.