Stephen R. Fleeman

Steve Fleeman taught at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana as a full-time graduate instructor (1973–1975) and then as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Technology (1975-1977). Steve left Purdue and moved to Rockford, Illinois (1977) to work as an electrical engineer at Sundstrand Aviation (which later became Hamilton Sundstrand). The goal was to gain industrial experience that could be used to enhance his teaching. Hamilton Sundstrand supplied the Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The APUs were used to provide hydraulic power. There were three systems on each Orbiter that were monitored and controlled by separate electronic controllers. Steve was on the design team that provided the Ground Support Equipment (GSE) to verify the integrity of the APU electrical system. His first Space Shuttle project was in 1978. Steve was sent to the Kennedy Space Center (2000) to witness a test procedure employing the modified GSE he had designed. The Space Shuttle Discovery was being prepared for its next mission. For an engineer, the opportunity to crawl in the aft bay of a Space Shuttle Orbiter was a dream made true. His support of the program continued until he retired in 2009. In 1985 the local community college (Rock Valley College) had discovered Steve was in Rockford and offered him a full-time teaching position in the Electronics Engineering Technology department. Steve accepted that offer. Sundstrand management then provided an additional offer for him to serve in a part-time electrical engineering position and agreed to a completely flexible schedule. It was fun (and sometimes a little frightening) to be given assignments to design things to support endeavors that Steve had never even imagined. Like designing an air-mass flow system required the use of a vortex-shedding flow meter or design an altimeter that can also display an indication of vertical speed. Initially, Steve would usually spend time pacing for the first couple of hours drinking coffee and fighting off sheer terror. Things always worked out as soon as his cooler head prevailed. Then things became fun – learning new concepts, using his knowledge, and enjoying successes. In every instance he either documented his analysis and the results in his personal engineering logbook or in a published (company internal) Aviation Engineering Report (AER). He loved writing about the projects. That passion carried over to his textbooks. In 1990 Prentice Hall published his first textbook. Now his published writing continues. The approach for the new textbooks is based on the perspective he employed in that first textbook. The concept is to present bipolar transistor amplifiers, field-effect transistor amplifiers, and integrated circuit operational amplifiers in a side-by-side fashion. This really simplifies the studies since the analyses are similar and the design comparisons are contrasted immediately.   You will encounter humor in his writing. Steve taught classes mainly in the evenings. Students who had worked all day were then challenged to be alert at night. Their goals were to attain official certificates and degrees to permit their job advancement and promote their job security. Steve held them to the same high standards as the “day” students but used jokes and humor to help them stay awake. He discovered the “day” students had the same sleep-deprivation problems. In their cases, they worked nights and had a petulance to succumb to their youthful instincts which led them to parties and romance. So, the jokes continued and became embedded in Steve’s lectures and writings. In 2009 Rock Valley College decided to provide an associate in applied science degree program in Sustainable Energy Systems. Steve took on the task of designing the curriculum and courses. Because of his work on the curriculum, Steve was invited to provide two TEDx talks, “Renewable Energy Integrators and the Reality Show” (2013) and “Coping with the Smart Grid Using a Smart Phone” (2016). Both presentations are available on YouTube. Steve retired from Rock Valley College (2017) after 35 years of service. His newly discovered “free time” now permits him to indulge his love of technical writing.