Collaborative projects with industry
Collaborative research projects, where the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering works with public and commercial organisations, span a range of activities. Click on the links below for details of some current collaborative projects:
Selex-Galileo
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a revolutionary all electronic telescope for the 21st century and is being planned as a next generation ‘discovery’ telescope with a 1km2 collecting area. As part of this project, the University of Manchester has teamed up with Selex-Galileo to work on key technologies and components for the low band phased array elements of SKA.
e2v
E2v and the M&N group at Manchester have built up a strong and fruitful relationship over the last 12 years and during this time have made huge strides in enabling MBE to be used in demanding high volume related applications, particularly in the field of mm-wave sensors.
Visualisation of Pharmaceutical Fluidised Beds
The University of Manchester has been leading research into electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) since the late 1980's. The latest ECT system has been used for visualisation of pharmaceutical fluidised beds for drying, granulation and coating. Professor Wuqiang Yang has been shortlisted as a finalist for the IET Innovation Awards 2009 in recognition for his research in this area.
BP/Pipeline Engineering
BP/Pipeline Engineering: The Control Systems group have developed a patented pipeline monitoring system for detecting and locating leakages and blockages in high pressure gas pipelines.
Further collaborative projects with industry are:
- With EDF Energy and AREVA, we evaluated alternative oils for high voltage power transformers, to assist in the design and building of the first environmentally friendly 132kV/90MVA power transformer.
- Research on actuators with Goodrich Aeronautical Systems has been implemented on the rudder systems of the Airbus A380.
- Novel techniques were integrated for process monitoring and control in collaboration with Falconbridge, Swedish Steel and Invensys, leading to the software package ArchitectMV that is now marketed by Perceptive Engineering Ltd.
- A customised high-sensitivity Electrical Capacitance Tomography system was used to optimise the TWISTER™ sub-sea liquid-gas separator in a project with Shell, Stork Engineering and Twister.
- Multi-physics modelling for design of non-reciprocal high-power ferrite components has been implemented by Com Dev Europe.