University Electronics

Flying robots that can show a degree of autonomy are being developed by engineers at the University of Sheffield. The idea is that the robots could ultimately play important roles in search and rescue missions, or operate in dangerous environments. The team, based in Sheffield’s Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (ACSE), uses simple Quadcopters. They have created software ...

Manchester is getting a rival when it comes to graphene research – the University of Surrey is setting up its own  research centre to focus on graphene. It will be part of the university’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) and will include manufacturing capabilities. Surrey’s ATI already has photo thermal deposition technology, which produces large scale electronic-grade graphene on wafer-scale substrates. “The ...

An advance in developing new high-temperature superconducting materials – which could be used in lossless electrical grids, next-generation supercomputers and levitating trains – has been made by researchers from the University of Cambridge, writes Richard Wilson. They have found that ripples of electrons, known as charge density waves or charge order, create twisted ‘pockets’ of electrons in these materials, from ...

Surrey University is highlighting its first position within The Guardian University Guide 2015, for electronic and electrical engineering. Caveat emptor with all such comparison tables, of course, but The Guardian table is supposedly based on teaching standards, academic progress and employability rates. For the record, Southampton is in second place and Imperial College third. “I’m absolutely thrilled by this outcome, ...

The University of Manchester is this week hosting a graphene congress, for companies working on graphene applications of the future. It runs 12th-13th June. It is the second annual Graphene Supply, Application and Commercialisation Congress, to give it its full name, and will examine how graphene is being commercialised. Speakers at the Congress include senior researchers from leading companies involved ...

The University of Southampton has appointed Liam Maxwell, government Chief Technology Officer, as a Visiting Professor in Electronics and Computer Science. “As CTO to the UK Government, Liam Maxwell occupies one of the most significant positions in UK IT and computing,” said Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the University’s Web and Internet Science Group. “He is leading a transformation ...

A team led by Dr Fiona Mathews, of Biosciences at the University of Exeter, has been studying the potential effect of mobile phone radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR) emissions on male fertility. They have conducted a review of the findings from ten previous studies. Previous research, says the university, has suggested that RF-EMR emitted by the devices can have a detrimental ...

More from Manchester University on the graphene front. The university has announced a new project, ‘Electrochemical Energy Storage with Graphene-Enabled Materials’ which will be exploring different ways to reduce the size and weight of batteries and extend their lifespan by adding graphene as a component material”. Before such batteries can be built the researchers need to study how graphene will ...

A team led by Dr Artem Mishchenko and Sir Andre Geim from The University of Manchester have found that the electronic properties of graphene change dramatically if graphene is placed on top of boron nitride, also known as ‘white graphite’. They have published their findings in Nature Physics. The university writes: A new direction that has recently emerged in graphene ...

We wrote back in January that Bristol University had been selected by Intel to become an Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC). Now, the University of Edinburgh joins the ranks. EPCC is the supercomputing centre at Edinburgh and it will be working with Intel. The university has announced: EPCC … has been designated an Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC), through a prestigious ...