- Date:
- 2010-2014
- Theme:
- Nanomaterials and Dielectrics
- Funding:
- National Grid plc
Transformer oil, or insulating oil, is usually a highly-refined mineral oil that is stable at high temperatures and has excellent electrical insulating properties. Its functions are to insulate, suppress corona and arcing, and to serve as a coolant. As the oil is in a direct contact with electrodes and paper insulation and experiences high temperatures, certain additives have to be included to stabilise its properties. On the other hand, key information about transformer insulation system can be extracted from the oil. It has been claimed that transformer oil contains about 70% of diagnostic information. However, due to lack of understanding and limited research, traditional oil test program utilizes only some of diagnostic parameters.
DC conductivity measurements have provided an important diagnostic measure for many solid insulation systems such as power cables. However, it receives little attention as far as transformers are concerned. The UK government has introduced initiatives and proposals to ensure more of our energy comes from renewable energy. Offshore wind farms play a key role in the UK energy policy and the number of wind farms in the UK will be steadily increasing. The energy transfer from the offshore wind farms to the NGC transmission systems is likely to be based on dc links. A high voltage dc converter transformer is an essential part of the dc link. The behaviour of insulation system in a high voltage dc converter transformer needs to be investigated as the insulation experiences a dc voltage component in addition to ac voltage. In the light of increasing interest in high voltage dc converter transformers, the study of oil conductivity becomes an ever urgent issue for oil producers, transformer manufacturers and power transmission and distribution utilities. Initial literature survey indicates that the conductivity of a liquid dielectric may span several orders in magnitude depending on the status of the liquid and its value is very sensitive to the dc field applied, temperature, moisture, contamination. Oil is particularly responsible for functional serviceability of the dielectric system in transformers. On the one hand, condition of oil can be a decisive factor, which determines the life span of the transformer. On the other hand, it also contains abundant diagnostic information which can be potentially used for transformer life management.
Primary investigators
- George Chen
- asv
Secondary investigator
- mh2e10
Associated research group
- Electronics and Computer Science
- Date:
- 2010-2014
Transformer oil, or insulating oil, is usually a highly-refined mineral oil that is stable at high temperatures and has excellent electrical insulating properties. Its functions are to insulate, suppress corona and arcing, and to serve as a coolant. As the oil is in a direct contact with electrodes and paper insulation and experiences high temperatures, certain additives have to be included to stabilise its properties. On the other hand, key information about transformer insulation system can be extracted from the oil. It has been claimed that transformer oil contains about 70% of diagnostic information. However, due to lack of understanding and limited research, traditional oil test program utilizes only some of diagnostic parameters.
DC conductivity measurements have provided an important diagnostic measure for many solid insulation systems such as power cables. However, it receives little attention as far as transformers are concerned. The UK government has introduced initiatives and proposals to ensure more of our energy comes from renewable energy. Offshore wind farms play a key role in the UK energy policy and the number of wind farms in the UK will be steadily increasing. The energy transfer from the offshore wind farms to the NGC transmission systems is likely to be based on dc links. A high voltage dc converter transformer is an essential part of the dc link. The behaviour of insulation system in a high voltage dc converter transformer needs to be investigated as the insulation experiences a dc voltage component in addition to ac voltage. In the light of increasing interest in high voltage dc converter transformers, the study of oil conductivity becomes an ever urgent issue for oil producers, transformer manufacturers and power transmission and distribution utilities. Initial literature survey indicates that the conductivity of a liquid dielectric may span several orders in magnitude depending on the status of the liquid and its value is very sensitive to the dc field applied, temperature, moisture, contamination. Oil is particularly responsible for functional serviceability of the dielectric system in transformers. On the one hand, condition of oil can be a decisive factor, which determines the life span of the transformer. On the other hand, it also contains abundant diagnostic information which can be potentially used for transformer life management.
Primary investigators
- George Chen
- asv
Secondary investigator
- mh2e10
Associated research group
- Electrical Power Engineering
- Date:
- 2010-2013
- Themes:
- Nanomaterials and Dielectrics, Solid dielectrics, High Voltage Engineering
- Funding:
- Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Although nanocomposites have been exploited for many years in connection with their enhanced mechanical properties, the potential of these materials for use in electrical systems has only recently begun to be considered. Nevertheless, nanodielectrics are now attracting worldwide interest as a result of the attractive combinations of properties that these materials can exhibit. A consequence of introducing a nanofiller into a polymer appears to be the incorporation of a multitude of shallow traps that are associated with the polymer/nanofiller interface, which serve to assist in charge transport. Or, more importantly, serve to prevent the build up of potentially damaging space charge ââ¬â an issue that will be of increasing technological importance as our reliance on DC links to renewable generation and interconnection of asynchronous generation islands grows. This project will examine the effect of nanostructuration on charge transport dynamics in polymer-based nanocomposites and will extend existing studies of this material class.
Primary investigators
- kyl1g10
- asv
- George Chen
Associated research group
- Electronics and Computer Science
- Date:
- 2010-2014
- Themes:
- High Voltage Engineering, Modelling and Simulation, Condition monitoring, Solid dielectrics
- Funding:
- Self funded - no external funds requested
This project is concerned with experimental and simulation studies into the degradation processes that occur when voids in solid dielectric materials experience high applied electric fields. A method has been developed for manufacturing 2mm thick samples of silicone resin that contain a single void of around 1mm diameter. Five samples are simultaneously electrically stressed under an applied ac sinusoidal voltage of 12kV for 6 hours and the voltage is then increased to 15kV until a sample fails. During the stressing period, PD data is regularly acquired. The remaining 4 samples are then inspected for signs of degradation. Degraded samples that have not suffered catastrophic failure and contain pits or evidence of electrical trees are sectioned using an ultra-microtome equipped with a CR-21 cryo-system set at -110ãâ¬âC in order to provide a surface containing open segments of pits or trees. The experiment is repeatable and the obtained degraded samples and the degradation areas of microtomed samples have been analysed using Raman spectroscopy to identify the chemical content of the degraded areas at the void /silicone rubber interface. In addition, models have been developed to simulate the observed PD behavior. These models will be adapted to include the degradation processes observed in the experiments.
Primary investigators
- Paul Lewin
- tb6g10
Associated research group
- Electronics and Computer Science
- Date:
- 2012-2014
- Theme:
- Web Science
- Funding:
- Fraunhofer Institute
A joint project between the WAIS research group of the University of Southampton and the FOKUS and IAIS research groups of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, investigating emerging topics in Web Science.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
Partner
- Fraunhofer Institute
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2011-
- Theme:
- Assessment
Expanding and distributing EASiHE tools is a collaborative effort between ECS and the Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas (UAT).
The project aims to:
- Disseminate EASiHE in HEIs outside the UK
- Translate some of the EASiHE tools to expand its uptake by universities in Spanish-speaking countries
- Evaluate if and how EASiHE tools may be used to evaluate the development of high-level skills of the Bloomââ¬â¢s taxonomy
Researchers and lecturers from UAT will develop a question bank for the module of Molecular Biology and use the items to produce exams to assess students across various academic programmes. This task will help the researchers to 1. implement e-assessment practices in the university and 2. facilitate the creation of standard exams for a compulsory module associated with different undergraduate programmes (e.g. nursing and biology).
Primary investigators
- Gary Wills
- Lester Gilbert
- Dr. Michelle A. Recio-Saucedo - C.I. POSEI/UAT
Secondary investigators
- Alejandra Saucedo
- Dr. Sergio Correa-Gutiérrez - Associate researcher
- Mtra. Guadalupe Castillo-Camacho - Content supervisor
- Lic. Alberto Ulises Ruiz-Zapata - Research assistant
- M.I. Vicente Paul SaldÃÂvar-Alonso - Lead developer
Partner
- Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas
Associated research group
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2011-2014
- Themes:
- Web Science, Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning
- Funding:
- EUFP7 (287863)
The recent massive growth in online media and the rise of user-authored content (e.g weblogs, Twitter, Facebook) has lead to challenges of how to access and interpret these strongly multilingual data, in a timely, efficient, and affordable manner. Scientifically, streaming online media pose new challenges, due to their shorter, noisier, and more colloquial nature. Moreover, they form a temporal stream strongly grounded in events and context. Consequently, existing language technologies fall short onaccuracy, scalability and portability.
The goal of this project is to deliver. innovative, portable open-source real-time methods for cross-lingual mining and summarisation of large-scale stream media. TrendMiner will achieve this through an inter-disciplinary approach, combining deep linguistic methods from text processing, knowledge-based reasoning from web science, machine learning, economics, and political science. No expensive human annotated data will be required due to our use of time-series data (e.g. financial markets, political polls) as a proxy. A key novelty will be weakly supervised machine learning algorithms for automatic discovery of new trends and correlations. Scalability and affordability will be addressed through a cloud-based infrastructure for real-time text mining from stream media.
Results will be validated in two high-profile case studies: financial decision support (with analysts, traders, regulators, and economists) and political analysis and monitoring (with politicians, economists, and political journalists). The techniques will be generic with many business applications: business intelligence, customer relations management, community support. The project will also benefit society and ordinary citizens by enabling enhanced access to government data archives, summarisation of online health information, and tracking of hot societal issues.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Mahesan Niranjan
- Sina Samangooei
Partners
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) GmbH
- University of Sheffield
- Ontotext AD
- Internet Memory Research
- Eurokleis SRL
- Sora Ogris & Hofinger GmbH
- Hardik Fintrade Pvt Ltd
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Communications, Signal Processing and Control
- Date:
- 2012-
Domain to provide Cool URIs for data sites in UK Academia.
Secondary investigator
- Date:
- 2011-
Open data service for the University of Southampton
Secondary investigator
- Date:
- 2012-2014
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Technology Enhanced Learning
- Funding:
- Technology Strategy Board
The project will explore the use of metadata to drive the creation, accessibility and commercial availability of digital content to dyslexic school pupils and elderly visually impaired. There are around 500million people worldwide who are either blind, visually impaired and/or dyslexic. The advanced use of metadata to personalise the delivery of accessible content to these users across different platforms has the potential to significantly improve the quality of life and independence of millions of people.
The prime reason the UK Government is supporting a funding strand for content delivery and in particular metadata is because it realises the entire publishing industry may soon be routed through California, through i-stores, Google Stores and Amazon. The publishing sector in the UK is our sixth biggest national industry and needs to make content available over the web in the future. The Metall project will explore the market opportunities and the evaluation of multipurpose set of tools to tag, find and retrieve content, using metadata.
Project Objectives
To explore:
- how a new accessibility metadata authoring tool and annotation service can be adopted by the creative digital industries to create metadata encoded resources;
- how electronic content, including eBooks, can be automatically tailored for people who have various vision and print impairments and how new content can be created by combining content from other sources;
- how accessible digital content can be located and moved from system to system using standards-based interoperability formats to support learning and training activities;
- what accessibility metadata must be defined for text-based digital resources and their alternative forms, how this metadata is used in conjunction with the personal needs and preferences for users, and how both sets of data are defined and exchanged. This will consider the ISO Access For All (AfA) Digital Resource Description (DRD) and Personal Needs and Preferences (PNP) metadata standards as part of a review of leading standards.
- how accessibility-based and other forms of metadata are combined to create an appropriate business model for the just-in-time creation of digitally accessible content ââ¬â this will be focused on content that must be provided in various Braille and text-to-speech formats.
Primary investigators
Partners
- Dolphin Computer Access
- Dyslexia Action
- RNIB
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science