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MATA Award 2024 Winner: Dipl. el. ing. Marin Čaveliš

Anja Rovčanin

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This year’s MATA Award winner for contribution in the development and promotion of new technologies in Montenegro is Marin Čaveliš, a graduate electrical engineer from Podgorica, who was nominated by the Prona Foundation.

The 40-year career of Marin Čaveliš as an engineer and scientist has been marked by continuous innovations in various fields of science and technology. Many of the practical and innovative solutions by Engineer Čaveliš have stood the test of time, bringing significant savings to businesses and society. He develops original measurement systems, investigates natural and technical phenomena, and writes scientific papers recognized for their originality and fundamental approach. In addition to science and technology, Marin Čaveliš is equally successful in literature and cultural work. His social-humanistic interactions and humility make him an intellectual figure that transcends local and national boundaries.

Growing up alongside his father, Martin, a pioneer of radio engineering and television in Montenegro, and surrounded by electronic devices, Marin Čaveliš naturally gravitated toward electronics and radio engineering. Even as a child, he achieved remarkable results in the radio club, working on the construction of high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) devices. For this work, he received the “Boris Kidrič” award in 1978, becoming the youngest recipient of this prestigious Yugoslav award for technical culture. To this day, he remains active in the Radio Amateurs Association and National Technical Society.

Here is a brief description of the most significant projects, innovations, and scientific work he has undertaken during his forty-year career:

From 1985 to 1988, he worked as an engineer maintaining the radio network of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. From 1988 to 1996, he served as an engineer maintaining electric locomotives at the Railway Company of Montenegro. During this period, he independently designed and built a test bench and other devices for testing, repairing, and adjusting almost all electronic modules of ABB–Končar electric locomotives. This enabled fast and reliable locomotive servicing, resulting in annual savings of over one hundred thousand dollars and several million dollars to date, as the locomotives and the test bench are still in use.

In 1996, he joined the Seismological Institute, where he worked on maintaining seismological instruments and the telemetry network. Together with Prof. Dr. Branislav Glavatović, he worked on digitizing the signals of the existing analog seismological network. By 1998, Montenegro became the first country in the Balkans to have a digital seismological network. From today’s perspective, the system was simple (PC 386 and DOS), but it operated continuously and successfully until 2024. For fifteen years, it served as the primary system and, after the modernization of the seismological network, as a backup system.

From 2007 to 2012, he participated in projects under NATO’s Science for Peace program:

  • Harmonization of Seismic Hazard Maps for the Western Balkan Countries (BSHAP-1), NATO SpS-983054; 2007–2011
  • Improvements of the Harmonized Seismic Hazard Maps for the Western Balkan Countries (BSHAP-2), NATO SpS-984374; 2012–2015.

In 2008, he developed a special shield to protect broadband seismometers from micro-changes in atmospheric pressure. This allowed for the monitoring of long-period signals generated by strong distant earthquakes, which, when analyzed, provide insights into the Earth’s interior structure. He presented the methods for constructing the shield at several scientific workshops.

Between 2008 and 2020, as part of his regular duties, he established a new seismological digital telemetry network, an accelerometric digital telemetry network, and a GPS network for monitoring tectonic movements.

Particularly noteworthy are his independent studies on measuring the atmospheric electric field and correlating its changes with strong earthquakes. During this research, from 1997 to 2002, he designed and built an original instrument and an acquisition system for collecting and processing variations in the intensity of the atmospheric electric field. Unaware that “field mill” sensors were already being used for atmospheric field measurements, he independently reinvented the sensor. In doing so, he discovered a previously unknown principle of electrodynamic induction in an electric field.

He described the phenomenon of electrodynamic induction in an electric field both physically and mathematically and provided an equivalent schematic for its application in an electric circuit. In 2000, he wrote the book Electrodynamic Induction Cell and later published scientific papers on the topic.

This original approach to sensor design enabled him to create sensors with much greater sensitivity than those available at the time. This improvement made it possible to measure small variations in the intensity of the atmospheric electric field. The results of these measurements pointed to a possible new phenomenon associated with strong earthquakes worldwide, with a global character.

He described this phenomenon and its possible physical origin in relation to known geophysical phenomena and the global electric circuit in his scientific papers. However, since the measurements were conducted in a single location and over a relatively short period, additional laboratories need to confirm the phenomenon for its existence and description to be widely accepted.

You can find Marin’s scientific papers on his ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marin-Cavelis-2.