Profile

Hello! I’m Vittawat, but you can call me Win for a shorter name. It is common for people from Thailand to have a very long name that accompany with a shorter name for ease of being referred to. The shorter name is something random that parents came up with, and my shorter name’s lottery turn out to be Win somehow!

I live in Birmingham with a wife and a cat, who mostly act as our boss rather than a pet! We are both very active person and spend a lot of time in the gym, though I still somehow manage to not be in shape. Cooking has always been my passion, and I do hold myself up to a high standard in my kitchen. While I love making French and Japanese food, I am procifient at other cuisines as well. As a plus, I also think I’m a pretty good baker as well!

Other than making food to feed the household and working out, I spend the rest of my time reading anything I can get a hand on, whether it be non-fiction book, news, article, manga, cartoon, you name it! I’m also an avid movie lovers regardless whether it is Hollywood, Bollywood, or any other foreign films.

Electricity network is one of the most complex network out there. Generally, you can think of electricity you use at home as a Low Voltage (LV) electricity, and the electricity being sent between cities or across the country as High Voltage (HV). My work deals mostly with High Voltage electricity network, particularly in managing the risk of High Voltage electrical assets such as transformer (changing LV to HV and vice versa), switchgear (think of a switch turning the HV electricity network on/off), and cables. It might be a surprise for you that these assets fail quite frequently despite regular checks and maintenance. Interestingly, many cables (particularly underground cables) failed accidently because construction workers dug into it! But in the case of transformer and switchgear, they tend to fail due to imperfection of insulation material, causing electricity to escape from its safe space and potentially causing significant damage. In some case, the damage could be something like a catastrophic explosion, which is never a good thing.

My area of expertise is in performing asset monitoring, where we continuously meausring data from the HV electrical assets, upload the data to the cloud storage, and perform data analysis to find any signs of the imperfection I mentioned. The technical term of failure caused by insulation imperfection is Partial Discharge (PD), which as the name stated, a phenomenon of electricity partially discharging from insulator causing damages to the system. Thus, I am one of those guys who sit in front of computer looking at graphs and numbers all day long to try making sense of the situation and warn my clients before any failure. The work may sound mundane to you, but it is crucial at ensuring we all have lights in our home. The role will be increasingly more important going forward to a Green future where technology like electric vehicle becoming dominant in our society. Thus, increasing the need for reliable sources of electricity in our every day life.

My day typically starts with a routine checks on measurement from every monitoring systems that I have under my responsibility, which currently sits at 14 systems. The routine checks I carried out simply look for any abnormal changes in amplitude of measurement, or any pattern that may indicate concerning activity within the HV electrical assets. This task could either take 30-40 minutes to do, or it could take all day depending on what is happening at each system.

After this task, I spend my time in preparing proposal for our potential clients. One of my responsibility is to understand what our clients want and design a monitoring solution that could satisfy their requirements. This might involve me attending client’s site to see the assets in real-life and determine what is needed to monitor the assets in question.

For some day, I would also be visiting clients throughout the country to provide training for installing our monitoring system as well. This task has becoming more and more popular of late, and I get to go around the UK quite often in the past few years. It was a blessing in a way that I get to see our beautiful country while working, which is a srtong point I enjoy working in this role.

Nowadays, there are many providers out there that design toys and experiment kits for young children with the purpose to interest them into STEM education. These toys/experiment kits are developed based on scientific concept that kids could play while learning at the same time. These kits may include basic programming robot, DIY mechanical clock kit, or even a simple microscope.

My aim with the prize money is to donate these toys/kits to children in poverty who may not have been exposed to STEM in hope that these toys could have inspired them to pursue a path towards STEM education.