Reflections of Sviatoslav Voskresenskyi
In our serie "What does the future bring?" our ESR's are sharing their perspective. This serie is linked to the Horizon Magazine article published on Monday, March 13 2024 which focusses on EU support for Ukrainian researchers including ETUT project regarding "Building bridges between Ukrainian and EU researchers" featuring Regis Nibaruta, Ivan Struzhko, Vladimir Havryliuk, Gert Rietveld and Frank Leferink. The full article can be found https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/building-bridges-between-ukrainian-and-eu-researchers By Andrew Dunne.
Via Cordis, the project is described as'the ETUT project will model, design, estimate, quantify and monitor economic measures for a reliable, safe, effective and greener electrical transport system. The training programme will include innovative methods to be applied in electric transport... it may have far reaching consequences and may even see the railway network supporting or replacing local electrical utility networks' Can you explain the problem specifically? In simple terms, what exactly is the electrical engineering challenge in terms of future electric transport systems and what's the link with local electrical utility networks too?
Speaking about electrical transport in general, personally the several challenges I’m aware of are battery capacity and charging network capacity.
The battery capacity is pretty obvious issue and the main stumbling block for modern autonomous electrical transport. For instance, while an average gas-powered car can reach up to 482 km on a full tank, most electric models have a range of 200 km on a single charge. Additionally, the charging time, type of plug or output power of charging station influence the charging time. In terms of network, the already available network we use every day to plug our smartphone charges or laptops is designed mostly for residential purposes and can’t be use for charging the autonomous vehicles due to limitations in output power. Hence for proper charging the doubling network designed solely for autonomous electrical vehicle charging is required. And from here the problem comes to electromagnetic compatibility domain and become similar with the one currently present in railway transport. The presence of transmission lines with high rate of voltage and current are potential sources of EMC meaning that the presence of those lines will change the electromagnetic environment of residential areas and all the equipment which was designed for operating in a “certified” environment will become a potential victim of the charging network. Another issues are more general and does not related to electrical part that much, as for example the maintenance price or price of a 1 KWh of spent energy.
Of course, the introduction of the charging station “to every house” is an interesting challenge, which requires adjustments of the charging network according to already existed environment but might be overcomplicated. Thus a good solution is might be to focus on the development and improvement the quality of supplied energy and reducing the electromagnetic noise form public transport vehicles or systems. In this way it will be easier to fit the systems to the available standards and reduce the amount of electromagnetic pollution since all the emission sources will be located in one place.
When we spoke you described these two areas of electrical engineering where the main focus was - electromagnetic compatibility and power electronics. Can you give me examples of the kind of devices that might benefit from improvements to both and can you explain the link with these two areas and future electric transport systems?
Basically, any type of electric equipment which includes logic circuitry or sensoring equipment will benefit from improvement of EMC and PE. Generally EMC in most cases is consequence of PE operation. The main goal in PE is to provide as much energy as possible with the highest frequency as possible, but since this energy “flows ” through a PBC traces with particular frequency, which are opposite to ground plane, it creates perfect conditions to produce the waste of the energy in form of unintentional radiated/conducted signal.
Are there any examples of really applied research which you are currently conducting which relates to electric transport systems which we can talk about? Can you explain what you are working on - in an applied sense - with whom, and how?
My research is focused on near-field measurement of radiated emissions. Generally speaking, it means that instead of performing the measurements with costly antennas in shielded environment or reverberating one which requires place of the entire room, we could make a setup which can fit a workbench and do the same job. Of course some systems like this do exist already but there are rooms for further improvement for them. Currently there are not so many researchers who work on this topic so it’s a bit tricky to find a person for collaboration.
What is the long-term hope with this work? From a research point of view, what are YOUR long-term motivations for this all is and what are the impacts he envisages in the future (i.e. who does he see will benefit from this research in the future, and how?).
As I mentioned previously in my research there are seweral options on how to improve already existing near field scanning setups, which could potentially decrease theprice of one, and make it affordable for everyone, including self-employed desingners or small businesses. Currently the Do-It-Yourself trend on the market grows up, because people want to have a cheap and affordable device to use. But the price is also depends on the certification procedure, which is a quite expensive and risky for a small budget companies. Hence the availability of the device which could decrease both the testing prise and hence the product price would be beneficial for everyone.
Could I get a reflection from you on the importance of developing future electric transport systems in view of climate change and emission reduction targets? Why is this issue you're tackling so important from an environmental perspective?
Reducing the amount of transport systems which use fossil fuel for propelling will definitely improve decrease the emission level, however if we speak about level of pollution in general, neither technology could give proper feedback if consumed immensely. Its not only important to develop and improve the technology of electrical transportation but also to understand the way we going to use it. If we speak about private transport, especially in urban areas, simple exchange of present amount of private internal combustion engine powered cars with autonomous electric vehicles will barely give us a benefit in terms of pollution and waste, as the current battery technology allows to use a single battery sell effectively up to 10 years. This way the amount of exhausted fumes will give way to land field li-ion battery solid waste which is not beneficial for environment anyways. Originally, the battery waste should be recycled however the cost of recycling is several times larger than the battery price and the recycling practice is not a well established one yet. Hence the research work can improve safety, immunity and efficiency of electrical transport systems, however the future of the climate change depends on the way those improvements would be used.