Walter A. Elmore

Biography

Walter A. Elmore was born in Bartlett, Tennessee on October 2, 1925. In 1943, at age 18, he joined the Army Air Corps and became a navigator in Troop Carrier service in 1945. Following World War II, he entered the University of Tennessee where he received the B.S.E.E. degree in 1949 and was a member of Thu Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi. He pursued graduate studies at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Washington, and the Newark College of Engineering.

In 1949, Mr. Elmore joined Memphis Light Gas and Water Division where he spent two years in Substation Design and, in 1951, began a long career with Westinghouse Electric Corporation. He spent one year in Pittsburgh as a Consulting and Application Engineer and, in 1952 was assigned to the Engineering and Service Division in Seattle, WA where he provided application assistance on all types of power apparatus to utilities in Washington State and Alaska. In 1964 he went to the Relay Instrument Division in Newark, NJ, and in 1976 was appointed manager of the Consulting Engineering Section in Coral Springs, FL with responsibility for the Model Power System and the application of protective relays.

Mr. Elmore was the manager of the Relay System Consulting Group and was responsible for the Westinghouse Protective Relaying Seminars held throughout the world. He and his highly competent team have conducted these educational seminars in a number of foreign countries, including Brazil, England, Taiwan, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines. Mr. Elmore is one of only two engineers honored by the Westinghouse Corporation through the installation of his portrait on its Coral Springs plant Engineering Excellence Wall ofFame, with the citation "in recognition of a significant record of engineering achievement in education, technical assistance, and advancement in state-of-the-art of applied protective relaying."

Mr. Elmore holds four U.S. Patents on relaying methods and has authored/coauthored 31 technical papers and articles. He has also authored six chapters of the internationally recognized text Applied Protective Relaying and Section 16, "Relaying and Protection," of the twelfth edition of the McGraw-Hill Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers.

Mr. Elmore's long IEEE affiliation began with AIEE membership in 1950. In 1962 he was chairman of the Power Group of the AIEE Seattle Section and co-authored the AIEE District Prize Paper on the subject of "Negative-Sequence Directional Ground Relaying." For the Power Engineering Society, he has served as Chairman of the Power System Relaying Committee (1983-84); Vice Chairman of the Technical Council and Chairman of the T.C. Publication Committee (1986); Chairman of the Technical Council (1988); member of the Executive Board. He was also a lecturer in the Co-Generation Protection Seminars sponsored by the IEEE Standards Board. Mr. Elmore was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1983.

Walt and Jane Elmore had three daughters. In addition to his family, his great loves were protective relaying and golf, each of which he says "require the utmost skill and ingenuity."

Elmore died on January 20, 2010.