After marking projects, coursework and of course exams, the undergraduate academic year is starting to wind down
…although there has already been an open day for September 2019 entry.
I presented some of our work on wave energy power take off development at the recent International Conference of Ocean Energy in Cherbourg. There is an amazing amount of work going on in this area, and there is real progress being made in the industry. Wave and Tidal development seems to be dominated by European industry (rather than UK / academia) and relatively little of it is in electrical drives, and the progress. Whereas once you might say that the UK led the way, and more recently just Scotland led the way, you could argue that France and other EU countries are taking lead over recent years. Here at Newcastle, Raihan has almost finished testing his unique Halbach array VHM, whereas Steve is about to commission the voltage source converter. More details can be found in the presentation I gave here.
In Aerospace, we are doing the initial stages of a new alternator, here is a motorette we are using to envisage the winding.
Meanwhile we are finishing off some thermal tests on our previous design, in response to some reviewers comments on one of our publications.
This quarter’s stem activity was at Beamish open air museums’ ‘wind in your sails’ event. This involved schools being set the challenge of making a wind mill out of “k’nex “. You can see here the moment me and another ‘judge’ tweaked their design – putting some twist on the blades converted a stationery blade into a high speed turbine!
Recently heard that one of our journal papers relating to the now-finished AEMTA project has gone live at 10.1109/TIA.2018.2849737