now in July Sweden goes into some form of hibernation and with it KTH as well. July is the month where most Swedish work places take summer vacation, including KTH. The reason to this is likely the climate here. With the long and dark winter behind, now is the time of (moderately) warm weather and long sunny days, with only four hours of night in Stockholm.
All teaching end by the end of May, examinations take place in the first half of June. In the second half of June falls “Midsommar”, the most important celebration in Sweden. People celebrate the summer and life outside. Just have a look yourself:
Midsommar pole, but one of the rings fell down.
The summer is a time to relax and recharge the batteries. While many Swedish families have a summer house in a remote area, others go into the mountainous areas to get a change of tapestry. A big portion of the students use this time to do some work for earning some income for the rest of the year or conduct a paid internship at a company to gain some experience.
With august, people are coming back to work with the new semester starting usually at the end of it, hopefully well rested and full of energy.
Hi everyone! Last week, I paid a visit to the Power Electronics Machines and Drives (PEMD) conference in Nottingham. The East Midlands is an area in which the spirit of Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce is still lingering. The company hosts a big R&D site just outside of Nottingham in Derby, and its engineers constitute a portion of the many industrial delegates who were participating in the conference. The conference is likely my last as a Ph.D. student, and my feeling of belonging to the electrical machines and drives community has definitely grown since I first participated in a similar conference more than four years ago.
Nottingham, the home of Robin Hood.PEMD 2024 opening at Nottingham University.
After four and half years of research, you leave quite some remaining in your digital libraries. So when it’s time to summarize your work in a thesis and get ready for your post-PhD life, it is necessary to engage in a bit of clean-up and dust-off process.
The first association of this process that came to my mind was an activity known as “döstäda” in Swedish, which literally means “death-clean” in English. Interestingly enough, I found out that there does not really seem to exist any corresponding word for this activity in English. However, the excellent newspaper The Local, which writes about Swedish news and customs in English, describes it very well: “The uniquely Swedish practice of ‘Döstädning’ (death-cleaning) is a method of decluttering based on which objects will be of value to loved ones after your death”, which is pretty much what any doctoral student has to do towards the end of his or her research education.
The thesis at KTH can be written as either a monography or a compilation of the peer-reviewed research papers that you have published. In my case, I have opted for the compilation. Practically, it means that I will weld all the papers in my portfolio together, and the main challenge is to ensure appropriate adhesion between all the bits and pieces. To begin with, why did we study the particular subjects? Using a top-down perspective, problems identified in the industry and within previous research set the ground. My method of ushering the reader through the text then becomes more introspective, which makes quite a lot of sense. Think of it as a natural evolution in research. Once you have your results in place, you need to assess your own work and then improve on it, meaning you first need to identify its weaknesses. This process ties quite well to a maxim, attributed to Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce, that I saw on a wall of the conference center of Nottingham University the other day:
“Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.”
As some of you already knew that I finally made up my mind to take a position in the academia rather than in the industry, it’s always hard for me to explain why. I’m neither a enthusiastic speaker nor a percipient thinker. It can be challengeable for me to go towards a position in a university. I thought that I should have lost my mind at that time. It drives me to explore my internal desire for this decision.
Before that, let me say some good word for our group, from the perspective of a native Chinese PhD. I have to admit that I’m so lucky to work in the EMD group, which “pulls” me to develop my research area in the postdoc period. (Footnote: the reason why I used “pull” rather than “push” is that I need to be efficient and open-minded dealing with my project work while exploring more research area freely. I don’t feel pushed or stressed out, and receive lots of help and supports. “push” is a negative word rather than a neutral word in my language). My supervisor Luca gave me the freedom to investigate the challenge and difficulty in the industry so that it could show the direction of our future work. In other words, I could work closely with Zparq and ABB to gain more experience.
In fact, it’s Luca who decided to join this project/team (ExpSkills-REM), whose latese event was to give the course at Narva. The aim of ExpSkills-REM is to educate professionals who work or intend to work in the field of permanent magnets along the whole value chain, including recycling and motor applications: Raw Materials, Technological Magnets, Circular Economy and Electromobility coming together. In Narva Estonia, Neo Performance Materials is building a permanent magnet factory, making it the first of its kind in Europe and the Western world. I hope this magnet product will be used in the permanent magnet motor soon.
For this course, thanks to the help and support of Luca, I had enough time to prepare our one-day module “Design and fabrication of REM-based devices and components” for this four-day course. Everything goes on well on those days except the heavy snow in Narva when we were visiting the factory.
Then, it became sunny again in the nex day.
For me, it’s the first time to give the course for the whole day. It is definitely a milestone in my life, but really tiring. Hence, I took a wonderful sauna after the course. There were always lots of interesting and useful discussion about some contents of the course, which inspired the teachers as well.
Coming back to the first question in this post, when comparing academia with industry, one of the major difference is that the position of the academia requires the duty of teaching and supervision, which is as important as the researching. I then realized that it’s also a great joy for me to discuss about the technical detail in the project as well as the philosophy of life. I hope to support my future friends (namely students) to freely explore their research and lifestyle. I already have been lucky enough to get this privilege at KTH and ZJU and I hope in the near future I also have the ability to share this luck/opportunity to those who believe in this way.
As this is my last weekend at KTH, I would like to say Hej då to all of you, EMD noblemen, project colleagues, and EPE friends. Take good care of yourself, as it is merely the deadline of the course, project, or paper, not the end of the world. Keep in touch and see you again.
Il sole sorge all’orizzonte e splende attraverso la nebbia. Sto guardando una nuova alba. If you’re not speaking Italian, I don’t expect you to understand that, so here’s the translation: The sun rises on the horizon and shines through the fog. I’m watching a new dawn.
A pretty lousy start to a blog, even if you ask me. No other comparisons made, it reminds me of the sloppy technique that Christopher Nolan used in his not-so-well-acclaimed Covid-19 release Tenet, where the audience was asked to accept the story rather than to understand it. A clear breach of trust as directors should never underestimate their audience. But bear with me!
Because after all, you might recognize a few words; and they all have something in common. Let me guide you through this loose tangle of Italian (word-) threads. The first suspect is the word sorge, from sorgere, which means to rise. The Risorgimento, the resurgence, was an emblematic and formative historical period of the Italian state where the peoples on the Apennine Peninsula finally were united under the umbrella of the Piedmontese-Sardinian kingdom. The first functioning administration was in place in 1861 and a rudimentary Italian parliamentary monarchy was governing the young country from the Piedmontese city of Turin, within commuting distance from the city of Alba, meaning dawn, at the center of Piedmont. Alba is most famous for its wines, most likely made from the Nebbiolo grapes that is the dominant variety in Piedemonte. The word nebbia, fog, is by the way the stem for the name of this grape variety. And for good reasons! Autumn dusks and dawns are more likely than not bringing fog over the scenic landscapes of the Susa Valley (where Turin is located) and its surroundings.
Clouds and fog from the summit of Pian del Lupo in the Piedmontese Alps at one of my bike excursions.
I know this, as I have experienced it first-hand since the beginning of September last year. At that point in time, I started a six-month research exchange at the Politecnico di Torino. When I look out my studio’s window over the roof ridges of the north part of the city center of Turin to the southeast (in the direction of Alba), I not only spot some of the memorials from the first Italian kingdom. I have namely had my fair share of nebbia to gaze through. And it’s not because I wake up every morning from drinking too much red wine.
Autumn fog surrounds one of the famous buildings in Turin: la Superga.
The stay in Torino has been a fantastic experience for me in many ways; personally and professionally. First of all, I’ve been trusted to contribute to the research conducted at PoliTo on automotive permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) and their fault tolerance. This is one of the areas where the research team under Prof. Gianmario Pellegrino at PoliTo has contributed some significant results lately. So being involved in that research is both an honor as well as a good chance to pick some of the masters’ brains. It has also meant that I’ve had to temporarily change track from the variable phase-pole induction machine, which has been the main subject of study for me during my doctoral education at KTH. As I’m sure you have experienced, such changes of scenery tend to sharpen your senses. As a result, we soon came up with an idea of how to swiftly determine which initial conditions that ensure the permanent magnets to remain healthy and the shaft torque to stay within acceptable bounds during an active short-circuit of the PMSM. It means that the car safely can come to a halt, whereas the traction motor will function, even after a severe failure of some other subsystem in the car (which triggers the active short-circuit). As such, the method can serve as a foundation for car manufacturers in their development of so-called functional safety systems. We will present our results at the ICIT conference in Bristol in March, so stay tuned.
Afternoon sun over the rooftops of Turin.
I cannot give enough credit to the people who helped me plan for the exchange, accommodated me at work once I arrived, and make my spare time in the city enjoyable. I will get back to you with some more news from the south of Europe before the end of my stay at the beginning of March.
It has been half a year since I participated in this international conference. Before I start to memorize the event at that conference, I would like to recommend some good conferences that are related to our research field (Maybe useful for fresh PhD and master students). ECCE and ICEM are two of the most famous conferences in the field of electrical machines, I think. ECCE is held every year, while ICEM is held every two years. Besides, I would recommend ICEMS, PEMD, and IEMDC which attract lots of motor engineers. For the motor design, Intermag and CEFC are good conferences, where many conference papers can be published in the IEEE Transaction on Magnetics. Meanwhile, IECON is related to the field of motor control. As the transportation electrification is more and more popular nowadays, I think we can consider submitting the papers to VPPC and ITEC.
Let’s come back to the conference IEMDC 2023. Please allow me to copy the description of this conference from the official website (https://www.iemdc.org/) so that I don’t need to summarizeit :). The 14th IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference (IEMDC) was held May 15-18, 2023 in San Francisco, CA. IEMDC provides a forum to share technology advances and new developments in the design, operation, analysis, and applications of electric machines and drives. Contributions are invited from industry, academia, and other sectors. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings, which will be submitted to the IEEE Xplore® digital library. Papers presented at IEMDC may be submitted to IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, or IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, according to the rules specific to each journal.
This year, I guessed that only two hundred participants, which is not as large as before. For me, I found two interesting trends from the tutorial of the conference. The first interesting topic is the application of hairpin winding. Still, lots of researchers are working on the improvement of the hairpin winding. The professors from the University of Nottingham gave excellent speeches to show their findings. The other interesting topic is the application of additive manufacturing (3-D print) on motor design. The Marquette University built a high power density motor equipped with additively manufactured windings and integrated with advanced cooling and modular integrated power electronics, which is fascinating. Of course, other tutorial topics are very interesting, but I cannot join as they were held at the same time slot.
At the conference, I met lots of famous professors from all over the world and engineers from well-known companies. I felt that we needed to know more about the accomplishments that the company has already achieved and try to fulfill the needs of the industry if we could (or we can focus). That will be beneficial to both academia and industry.
Finally, I would like to present some beautiful pictures of San Francisco. I love the weather there. Even though I was told that it was dangerous in the city center, I felt safe during my stay. Some pictures around the city.
By the way, I’m looking forward to seeing the post of IECON 2023, in which I was absent. I believe that Yixuan, Gustaf, and Xinpo had a pleasant time in Singapore. It is really nice to see that EMDers reunite somewhere. I cannot say that I didn’t envy you guys. Also, I hope to see you all soon.
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