Faraday fast track proposal: Electromagnetic compatibility in complex electrical systems

Principal Investigator: Dr R H Tew (School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham)

Other Investigators: Professor C Christopoulos

Starts: 16 September 2002
Ends: 15 February 2005

Value: £98,696 (GGIEMR share £30000)

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) - the ability of two nearby circuits to operate without mutual interference - is a serious issue in many industrial applications, and often affects safety issues. This gives rise to a high demand for accurate EMC prediction techniques which can be applied to electrical problems of industrial relevance in a reliable and cost-effective way. The associated technical difficulties are immense since the electrical complexity (which includes the vast array of individual components and how they are inter-connected etc) mean that existing numerical solvers cannot handle such complex configurations in realistic time and cost scales, if at all. Stochastic variations in real-world configurations add significantly to these difficulties. We aim to develop mathematical, numerical and stochastic homogenization techniques relevant to modelling such systems in a well-defined 'average' sense - removing the need to use full-scale numerical attacks on the unapproximated Maxwell's equations. We plan to apply our results to problems of industrial importance, hopefully providing a method which is practical enough to cope with a wide diversity of electrical systems but which does not compromise accuracy.