Test Facility for High Speed, High Power, Drives

Over the last decade there has been a trend towards the use of variable speed electrical drives in new applications, where hitherto they had been too expensive, too bulky or unable to cope with the extreme environmental conditions. The torque capability of an electrical machine is generally proportional to its size, consequently power per unit mass can be increased by resorting to very high speed machines. Advances in materials, fast switching power electronics and fast digital signal processing provides the framework to enable us to build higher speed systems, whilst new semiconductor materials, such as silicon carbide, permit power electronics to operate at temperatures of 400 degrees centigrade. This project will create a high speed test facility for novel aerospace drives, which have been developed to achieve very high reliability through fault tolerance, along with high speed automotive drives which can be used in future generations of vehicles. It will also permit testing of a range of other electrical drive solutions which are being developed in blue sky research projects.