Engineering News
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ELECTRONIC & SYSTEMS NEWS Warwick graduate returns on a 5-year Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Peter Gammon back to the School of Engineering. He obtained his MEng in Electronics Engineering at Warwick in 2005, before completing his PhD here in 2011. He has begun a five-year Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship this spring, with a project entitled “Novel Interlayer Cooling for Harsh Environment (NICHE) Devices and Circuitry”, which aims to produce a range of silicon electronic devices that will operate in adverse conditions, including environments where the temperatures will exceed 250 °C. Such application areas include space, solar cells and power electronics.
During his undergraduate degree, Peter benefited from the flexibility of Warwick’s General programme, taking courses not only in the core Electronics, Civil, and Mechanical streams, but in Maths, Physics, Business and even French. He eventually found that he favoured electronics however, and undertook an interdisciplinary 4th year group project to design, produce and test a non-invasive, capacitive unit, for finding reinforcement bars in concrete. Peter also embarked on an individual undergraduate research project into power electronic devices. Through this
he met Prof. Phil Mawby, who would go on to be his PhD supervisor. During his PhD, Peter published four academic journals on the production of power saving electronic devices using a before untried combination of semiconductor materials. Peter now continues his semiconductor research in a brand new silicon-valley-style clean room, which was built as part of a £10.6 million investment by the Birmingham Science City program. As well as offering opportunities to PhD students in this field, future undergraduates will be able to get involved in Peter’s NICHE project through 3rd year projects, giving them a taste of life in high-tech academic research.
£3.7m EPSRC Grand Challenge in Integrated Energy Storage for the Network Prof. Jihong Wang is the Principal Investigator in the School of Engineering for the newly awarded EPSRC Grand Challenge in Integrated Energy Storage for the Network. The £3.7million project is entitled “Integrated, Market-fit and Affordable Grid-scale Energy Storage (IMAGES)”, and will address a major gap in the field of energy. The UK is particularly vulnerable in terms of network stability, as it has a relatively isolated small island power network. With an impending reduction in the use of fossil fuels and an increase in reliance on clean, variable intermittent energy generators, the need for effective and efficient energy storage becomes a pressing requirement. IMAGES will focus on the challenging technical and economic issues faced by integrating large grid scale energy storage with the energy network. The project consortium is made up of twelve partners from four different institutions; Warwick, Nottingham, Loughborough and NERC British Geological Survey. Links within the University come from the Economics and Mathematics departments. The multi-disciplinary group will enable a fully holistic approach to this major issue.
New grant for “Control and Real Time Optimisation of Intensive Polymerisation Processes” Prof. Alexei Lapkin is the PI for Warwick for two recently awarded EU FP7 grants. The vision for one of these on “Control and Real Time Optimisation of Intensive Polymerisation Processes” (COOPOL) is to develop new methods and tools for modelling and control, based on real-time sensing. This will facilitate the development of a new paradigm of processes: intensive, low-impact, sustainable chemical technologies. Dr. Daciana Iliescu is a co-investigator on this project, and participants in the project come from Germany, Norway, the Czech Republic as well as Chemistry Innovation Ltd, based in the UK. The Warwick team is coordinating COOPOL project.