CSC joins new centre for electromechanical energy conversion systems

CSC participates to a new Centre of Excellence High-Speed Electromechanical Energy Conversion Systems

The Academy of Finland has selected eleven Centres of Excellence (CoE) for the period 2022‒2029. CSC is part of the CoE High-Speed Electromechanical Energy Conversion Systems led by Professor Anouar Belahcen (Aalto University).

This Centre of Excellence meets the challenges of an electrifying world. 

– Our goal is to develop modelling and analysis methods and methodologies for producing sustainable and compact electrical machines and drives, mechanical transmission and systems that are essential for a cleaner future, Belahcen said. 

According to Peter Råback, CSC, about half of all electricity consumed in the world goes to electrical machines that basically transform the energy to mechanical rotational movement. New uses of electrical machines in transport, aviation and hydrogen compression drive the developments towards high-speed machines much smaller in size. These will be based partially on new design principles and new materials that are more difficult to model computationally, and also demand more computational power. CSC provides the needed infrastructure for this kind of research enabling more accurately models to be run with the help of high-performance computing.

– The application was recognized for the full scientific chain being covered: from theoretical development, physical simulation codes, mathematical aspects of computing, and validation through prototyping and experimentation. It was also acknowledged that the consortium has world-class validated simulation environments and open source codes like Elmer. This shows directly the benefits that CSC brings to the consortia, Råback said.

Elmer is a multiphysical modelling software based on the element method (FEM) mainly developed at CSC, with thousands of users around the world on all continents. The software was released under open source already in 2005 and has been developed also for electro-mechanical problems jointly with researchers for many years.

In addition to Belahcen and Råback the CoE High-Speed Electromechanical Energy Conversion Systems includes Senior Scientist Jenni Pippuri-Mäkeläinen (VTT), Professor Juha Pyrhönen (LUT), Academy Researcher Paavo Rasilo (TAU) and Professor Kari Tammi (Aalto University) and their research groups.  

This article was first published on October 21 by CSC.