Insulation degradation equipment and facilities
The partners have access to equipment and facilities for electrical machines and power electronics design, prototyping and characterisation, partial discharge detection and management, insulation health monitoring, electromagnetics modelling and advanced power converter waveform control.
The University of Sheffield
The Electrical Machines and Drives group has state-of-the-art facilities and tools for modelling, designing, prototyping and testing electrical machines and drives systems for safety critical applications.
Equipment includes a wide range of high-power, high-voltage (up to 3kV) programmable AC and DC power supplies, a range of dynamometers for high power and high speed machine and power converter tests, high-bandwidth sensors and data acquisition systems and environmental chambers.
The group has developed and validated a range of methods for fault detection, fault tolerant control, non-invasive real-time condition monitoring of the insulation health and prognosis of its remaining useful life.
The University of Manchester
The work will be carried out in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and specifically in the National Grid High Voltage Research Centre.
The centre has six experimental laboratories associated with high voltage engineering, dielectric materials, protection and control, and measurements and instrumentation.
The high voltage laboratories already house a number of altitude chambers that will be used for this work, a range of voltage supplies including AC, DC and variable frequency and specialist partial discharge measurement equipment.
The University of Bristol
The Electrical Energy Management Group (EEMG) at the University of Bristol has a range of state-of-the-art facilities and equipment for testing power electronics converters and electric machines.
This includes high-power, high-voltage (1kV+) programmable AC and DC power supplies and load, 1MVA dynamometer for large machine and power converter test, advanced DSP/FPGA digital control platforms; high-bandwidth (eg GHz) voltage, current and impedance measurement equipment and techniques for characterising wide-bandgap (WBG) devices and magnetic components and environmental chamber.
The group has developed a range of WBG device-based converters to improve system efficiency, power density and mitigate side effects of high dv/dt.
