For over 10 years, research cluster MEDEE’s DNA has been made of projects on innovative electrical machines and transformers.
Even if MEDEE’s scientific community’s skills have recently been recognised in the field, working on Smart Electric Grids still requires to solve a few Electrical Engineering problems first..
The CE2I project, which we are presenting in this newsletter, is a very ambitious project supported by Lille 1 University and Professor Betty Lemaire-Semail, on behalf of the seven other supervisory authorities of the former Nord-Pas-de-Calais Region and funded within the 2015-2020 CPER framework.
CEII: an Integrated and Smart Energy Converter (Convertisseur d’Energie [CE] Intégré [I] et Intelligent [I]):
- It is meant to be embedded since the technological ambition is to design monitoring, control and supply systems which will be embedded inside the machines themselves… It is an energy efficiency, compactness and high-temperature resistance challenge meant to match industry’s new requirements regarding on-board systems in particular.
- It is meant to be smart since the aim is to design fault-tolerant machines with a control system that will include self-reconfiguration functions. As it used to be said about our motor-cars a few years ago, “Running on three out of four cylinders is still better than being stopped in the middle of nowhere!” There again, the number of potential industrial applications concerned is huge.
Many technology locks have to be removed: high-performance insulating materials or magnetic steels to be developed, converter architectures to be invented, innovative heat-removal devices…
All those challenges are what the scientific community and all its research fields together propose to take up. This is undoubtedly where the major strength of the project lies.
The door is also wide open to industrial manufacturers, international groups or start-ups in search of new markets who would expect to benefit from CE2I to promote their innovations: MEDEE will know how to provide them with the required support to develop collaborative projects contributing towards the improvement and enrichment of what the “21st-century motor” will be like.
Paul DUCASSE,
MEDEE CEO