Partners
The project is jointly conducted by six different organisations:
- BAE systems (Project lead, user requirements, testing, simulations, valiadation)
- Bombardier
- Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA)
- Transcendata Europe Ltd
- University of Liverpool (Systems integration requirements, simulations, support)
- University of Nottingham (CAD requirements, lead variational analysis).
The University of Nottingham (George Green Institute) has a considerable international reputation in the field of computational electromagnetics (CEM).
The University of Liverpool has considerable experience in the through-life health of electromagnetic systems.
Industry partners
Transcendata is the supplier of choice for CAD capture, repair and gridding software and was a pioneer in the field of automatic gridding for electromagnetic analysis.
MIRA brings significant expertise in leading edge research in support of the car industry in a number od fields including electromagnetics.
Bombardier (Northern ireland) is an airframe and systems integrator, particularly for Carbon Fibre wing structures for civil aircraft.
Project aims
This project aims at optimising the structure of cables in bundles used in large platforms such as aeroplanes and ships, and then applying the restructured cable bundles as a new defined regulation to different application scenarios with minimal variations. It is essential that an optimized structure of cables in bundles be found because the existing cable bundles assembled randomly make it difficult to model the electromagnetic field accurately and therefore unable to predict coupling between cables. However, the new structured cable alternative would offer many breakthroughs, the most profound example of which is that a more accurate model can be obtained when using computational electromagnetic methods to analyse shielding and reduce cable coupling. As a result, future cable bundles will have lower volume, cost and weight and better immunity against electromagnetic threats, such as Lightning and high intensity radiated fields (HIRF).
To fulfil the objectives of this project, Unitversity of Nottingham and BAE systems will firstly develop computational modelling tools for representing the geometry of the cable system with sufficient accuracy, which will later be used to find the optimized structure of the cable bundles and analyse its performance. Based on this, University of Liverpool, acting as a third party, is responsible for proposing requirements of new cable systems, investigating the optimised structure of cables by testing cable bundles having varied parameters (age, for example), and finally modelling the structured cable systems by different methods and well known commercial software (such as CST Studio Suite) to verify the final outcome. For more information about the CST Studio Suite, please find at the CST website.
After the project is finished and the results that enable better prediction of cable coupling are obtained, the information from this project will be disseminated to the UK and European cable and connecter manufactures for aerospace and motor vehicle area in the hope that they are able to manufacture the new cable products to meet the emerging automotive and aerospace standards.
Objectives
This project is constructed to provide a cable solution in large platforms that gives better definition and less error to measured and computed values of electromagnetic coupling, which in turn should lead to lower margins, lower equipment qualification levels with resultant lower cost, lower volume and lower mass.
Technologies used by ICENITE
A combination of both analytical and numerical approaches are to be used for variational analysis. The results will be verified using different CEM (Computational Electromagnetics) simulation softwares by different partners.
Back to: ICENITE