Newcastle University

Centre for Advanced Electrical Drives

In 2007 we created the Centre for Advanced Electrical Drives, using £1M of funding from One NorthEast. We established the centre with the following aims:

• To provide a world leading service to industry for the research and development of advanced electrical drives and machines.
• To assist industry in the creation and maintenance of a market lead in new products containing embedded electrical drives.

The Centre researches, designs, manufactures and tests high performance brushless electrical drive systems, incorporating electrical machines, power electronic converters, controllers and sensors. These drives can then be embedded and tested within novel new products. The Centre contains items of specialist equipment, including:

• Machine manufacturing equipment, including a wire erosion machine for cutting motor laminations, balancing machine, magnetiser, mechanical press and measuring equipment, winding facility and environmental test chamber.
• Test equipment, including d.c. and a.c. power sources, very fast sampling oscilloscopes, high performance current probes, direct current power supplies, power meters, logic analyser, dynomometers for high and low speed test rigs, safety cabinets, datalogging etc.
• Simulation hardware and software, including workstations, finite element software, printed circuit board design software, circuit simulation software and Computer Aided Design software.

We have two offices, a video conferencing room and two laboratories dedicated to industrial research, where both university and industrial staff can work in a secure, confidential environment, liaising with our academic specialists in electrical machines, drives and power electronics. The centre is currently being used by staff working on projects funded by Dyson, Goodrich, Hoganas and QinetiQ.

There are images of the video conference and meeting area in our Virtual Building Map.

For further information please contact: