FEMM Hub Members Host IEEE Event Featuring Dr. Thomas M. Jahns of the University of Wisconsin 

On Monday the 18th of August, the IEEE Student Branch and the Electrical Machines and Power Research Group at the University of Sheffield hosted a guest lecture in the Sir Frederick Mappin Building.  The lecture titled "The Quest for High Reliability and Fault Tolerance in Future Aerospace Machine Drives", was delivered by Dr. Thomas M. Jahns, the Grainger Emeritus Professor of Power Electronics and Electrical Machines in WEMPEC research group at University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA. Dr Jahns is a Member of US National Academy of Engineering, Recipient of IEEE Nikola Tesla Technical Field Award, IAS Outstanding Achievement Award, and IEEE Medal in Power Engineering. 

The guest was invited by Professor Zi-Qiang Zhu and the lecture on Monday was hosted by FEMM Hub's Dr. Xiao Chen. 

The abstract for the presentation can be found below: 

Impressive progress is being reported around the world on achieving major increases in the power density of electrified aircraft propulsion drive systems. However, the reliability of today’s electric machine drives falls orders of magnitude short of the daunting reliability requirements of propulsion systems in today’s commercial widebody aircraft. While many agree that modularity will play a major role in achieving major drive reliability improvements, modularity is woefully inadequate to do the job alone. The first part of this presentation will be devoted to examining the four key features required in tomorrow’s aerospace electric machine drives to make them even candidates for meeting the highly demanding flight reliability certification requirements associated with future all-electric commercial aircraft. The second half of the presentation will address the concept of faulttolerant modular machine drives (FT-MMDs) that is being pursued as a promising approach for achieving major improvements in the machine drive’s mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) ratings while simultaneously delivering worldclass power density values. A combination of analysis and experimental results for a FT-MMD demonstrator unit now under development will be presented to illuminate both the encouraging progress being made to achieve major reliability improvements as well as the serious remaining challenges.