Dr Nigel Schofield graduated with a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the Sheffield University in 1987 and PhD in 1997.  He joined the Power Conversion Group at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Electrical Drive Systems and Mechatronics in July 2004, after spending a number of years at the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer and a period in industry working on the design of brushless permanent magnet machines for electric vehicle traction.  He has worked on a diverse range of EPSRC, EC, DTI and industrially funded research projects, researching and realising electrical drive systems for the automotive, industrial, marine and aerospace market sectors.  Specifically, full vehicle concept drive-trains for electric vehicles employing supercapacitor peak power buffers, power dense batteries, hydrogen fuel cells and power dense permanent magnet machines.  In the industrial and marine sectors he is working on the improvement of servo-drive performance utilising in-line torque measurement feedback, and he has designed drive systems for deep-sea remotely operated vehicles and actuation systems for the calibration of dynamic force sensing equipment.  In the aerospace sector he has worked on DTI and EC funded research in electro-mechanical and electro-hydraulic actuation systems for aircraft flight control surfaces.  He is currently a partner on the EU FP6 Integrated Project: ‘Cost-Effective Small Aircraft (CESAR)’, where he is Task leader for Actuation Systems.  Dr. Schofield is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the IET and IEEE.

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Design considerations for more electric power-trains

 

The impetus for more energy efficient and environmentally friendly road vehicles is motivating research and development into electrically powered vehicles for road transport applications.  This tutorial is structured to give (i) an appreciation of the issues encompassing the move to lower emission road transportation, (ii) an understanding of the technical and economic aspects of new vehicle drive-train technologies and (iii) the ability to make informed design decisions associated with the integration of more-electric systems for road vehicle traction and control.

 

The tutorial will consider:

The political background to more environmentally acceptable land transportation systems;  Energy supply and emissions, well-to-wheel analysis;

Vehicle energy utilisation; Electric vehicle drive-train concepts and configurations; Power and energy storage device; Fuel cells; Electro-chemical batteries; Electro-mechanical and electro-static energy storage;

Vehicle power-train components, electrical machines and power electronic converters, gear-stages, differentials and braking;

Electrical machine design issues, technologies, topologies, basic sizing criteria rating thermal, mechanical, integration constraints;

Power conversion requirements, voltage levels, devices, control strategies, sensing;

Energy management and vehicle communications, Auxiliaries and vehicle hotel loads;