Distribution manager for electromagnetic compatibility and power quality.

Schaffner have appointed Jamie Furness as their new Distribution Sales Manager for the EMEA region.

 

Jamie Furness

Jamie Furness is familiar with the Schaffner product range having previously represented Schaffner while working at Farnell, and with tenure at Avnet, TTI and Future he knows the distribution channel very well.  He also has experience managing distributors both across EMEA and globally from his time working with manufacturers TE Connectivity and, more recently, Anderson Power Products.

 

Graduating from Salford University (GB) with a BEng (Hons), he has more recently completed an MBA from Leeds University. After 6 years in the British Royal Navy, Jamie has now acquired over 20 years of experience in the electronic component industry. He will be based in the new office for Schaffner, recently relocated from Wokingham to nearby Binfield.

 

Paul Dixon, Sales Director EMEA at Schaffner, comments: “Jamie has a deep understanding of the component business and joins Schaffner with a wealth of experience covering both products and distributors. He has a passion for customer focus, and his industry knowledge and people skills make him the ideal candidate to lead our channel strategy in EMEA. I am delighted to welcome him to Schaffner and wish him every success in his new position.”

@proactivefleet #Schaffner #PAuto #Power #Britain

Electromagnetic design pioneers celebrate 30 years of success!

Three of the earliest Vector Fields employees still work for Cobham Technical Services
(LtoR) Chris Biddlecombe, John Simkin and Chris Riley.

Coinciding with Cobham’s 80th anniversary celebrations, the developers of the renowned Opera electromagnetic simulation software are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Vector Fields Software business unit. Initially focused on making the design of particle accelerator magnets practical, their software tools remain at the leading edge of electromagnetic design today. This success is in large part due to continuing development of the founders' pioneering ideas for numerical software - which made possible the first practical commercial solution for solving complex and three-dimensional electromagnetic simulations.

The first major users for Opera software were almost all at the major physics labs around the world. At these sites, Opera was used to prototype advanced superconducting and resistive magnets for high energy and particle physics research - equipment which was too large and costly to prototype and refine in the normal 'cut and try' way. This user base at the very forefront of global scientific knowledge still remains a major strand of the company's business. However, the functionality of Opera and the user-friendliness of the design tools, has evolved almost beyond recognition to offer solutions for a much broader range of design requirements.

Opera has a distinguished track record of technological firsts and pioneering advances in electromagnetic design. Although progress in computing and graphics technology have been of enormous importance and often appear to underpin advances in the field, the background work of Opera developers on fundamental mathematical techniques, on accurately modelling material properties, speeding design entry and analysis, and optimising designs, has resulted in orders of magnitude improvements in the speed and fidelity of the virtual prototyping process. Today, much of the company's research revolves around allowing the software to perform ever more complex multi-physics simulation of electromagnetic design problems - taking into account factors such as mechanical stress and temperature – and improving performance using parallel computing.

"When we started in business, speed of simulation was the most fundamental challenge we faced," says Chris Riley, who was the fifth employee to join the early start-up Vector Fields business. "Even though we now have orders of magnitude more computing power, execution speed is still a critical challenge - because the scale and complexity of design problems also continually expands. It doesn't matter if you're designing a multi-million dollar magnet system for steering particle beams, or a $20 electromechanical actuator - today's users want to squeeze the last fraction of a percent of perfection out of any idea. And that demands capabilities such as 3D modelling, finer resolution of finite element meshing, consideration of multi-physics effects and intelligent optimisation. The challenges keep on coming, and overcoming them to deliver software that can be used to perform optimal electromagnetic design is the driving force behind Opera today."

The technology behind Opera began life at Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL) who cooperated with CERN in the 1970s to help break down a barrier as particle physics research moved towards higher energy accelerators - the need to reliably design superconducting magnets. After initial work on volume integral formulation software the team looked at solving Maxwell's equations using the more versatile finite element analysis technique. Chris Biddlecombe, now Opera Development Manager, created a program called PE2D (Poisson's Equation in Two Dimensions) using magnetic vector potential, which met with considerable success. However, making a direct transition to three-dimensional analysis would not have been viable with the computer resources available in the late 1970s. This led RAL scientists Bill Trowbridge and John Simkin - who went on to found Vector Fields in 1984 – to develop a new computational technique based on the use of scalar potentials. The commercial electromagnetic finite element 'solver' - named TOSCA for TOtal SCAlar - was a breakthrough and won its developers the Maxwell Premium Award from the UK's IEE. Its ideas still form the basis of much of the Opera suite of tools today.

The core electromagnetic simulation technology was in place. The focus of much of the early work for the fledgling Vector Fields business was the development of a graphical modelling and post-processing environment, and analysis functionality - to create a comprehensive suite of user-friendly tools for the virtual prototyping design process. This all came together by the late 1980s, and it was dubbed Opera. Vector Fields continued successfully developing more application specific tools and advanced analysis capabilities, often in collaboration with prestigious partners, from leading-edge industrials to educational leaders. Vector Fields now trades under the Cobham brand after joining the Cobham group in 2005, where it has continued to grow and maintain its place as one of the world leaders.

Today, thousands of users employ Opera for design and simulation tasks for applications such as electrical machines, transformers, X-ray tubes, ion beam sources, ship signature calculations and non-destructive test equipment. The company's recent annual European User Group Meeting saw presentations on applications as diverse as HEV traction motors to particle accelerators, magnetic gearing to aerospace components.

Recent advances include parallel-processing capability to match modern hardware, the first multi-language versions and enhancements to deliver true easy-to-use multi-physics models.

“In the ever-advancing world of virtual prototyping there is no such thing as resting on your laurels” says Kevin Ward, director of the Vector Fields Software business. “We have an exciting five-year plan ahead of us for Opera, launching into new applications, putting it in the hands of a new wave of engineers, and establishing the technology in emerging markets.”

Multiphysics simulation tool accelerates electromagnetic design projects

The latest Opera electromagnetics simulator 
adds mechanical stress analysis, extending
the tool's multiphysics capability to provide a 
single-step solution to complex design problems.

A powerful new version of the Opera electromagnetics simulator for design engineers has been released by Cobham Technical Services. The latest software adds three-dimensional mechanical stress analysis, extending the tool's multiphysics capability to provide a single-step solution to complex design problems. By capturing mechanical deformation in conjunction with electromagnetic and thermal modelling, the integrated software can greatly reduce design complexity and timescales.

Opera version 15, from the Vector Fields Software business unit of Cobham Technical Services, provides a complete design-simulate-analyze-optimize toolchain for electromagnetic applications. The software is renowned for its accuracy of simulation and speed of execution - allowing demanding simulations to be solved on standard office-grade PCs. It is available in a number of variants that include finite element analysis (FEA) for static and time-varying electromagnetic fields, and application-specific solvers for rotating electrical machines, superconducting magnets, charged particle beam devices, and magnetization/demagnetization processes. Advanced material models, such as lossy dielectric insulation and magnetic hysteresis, put Opera at the cutting edge of simulation capability. Opera’s electromagnetic models may also be coupled with third-party system simulation tools available within Simulink.

The new three dimensional stress analysis module solves for deformations within the elastic limit of the materials, and may be coupled with the electromagnetic solvers to provide a single-step solution to virtual prototyping. In addition to stress and strain produced by the application of mechanical loads and by electromagnetically induced forces, Opera's thermal analysis module may be used to co-simulate thermal expansion. The effects of gravity or rotationally induced forces can also be incorporated in design simulations.

The latest version 15 of the software extends the fundamental performance advantage of Opera for many common design engineering applications. For instance, mechanical deformation is a vital consideration in the design of large and superconducting magnets, and electrical equipment and coils in transformers, motors, generators and actuators. The ability of a superconducting magnet's coils to withstand the mechanical forces generated during a quench, or the mechanical integrity of the stator end windings of a generator subject to a short-circuit condition, are critical design requirements.

Many other enhancements are incorporated in the new release of Opera, to simplify and speed the design process. One of these supports the rapid creation of models of coils, by providing a dynamic pictorial representation of the model under construction, to guide the user as design data is entered. This extends Opera's existing user-friendly approach to creating models of coils (and other common structures) which allows a user to select common forms of construction from a library, and then enter the design data using dialog boxes.

To aid the final optimization of a design, Cobham's Opera software package can be supplied with an advanced auto-optimization tool that has been designed specifically to work with its finite element methods. This tool is able to work out the best solution for one or multiple goals — even when they compete with each other.

Enhanced electromagnetic analysis software accelerates RF and microwave design

Concerto speeds simulation of RF designs
employing advanced metamaterials, allowing
representation by bulk properties.
Here, a plane wave strikes metamaterial
with a negative refractive index.

Cobham Technical Services has a new release of the Concerto electromagnetic design software for RF and microwave applications from its Vector Fields Software product line. Concerto provides developers with a very cost-effective means of achieving the best solution in the shortest possible time. The latest version - Concerto v7.5R1 - incorporates numerous enhancements to accelerate further every aspect of design, simulation, analysis and optimization.

Many of the enhancements in this release centre on the powerful 3D geometric Modeller that forms an integral part of all Concerto configurations. This has new meshing options for the finite element (FE) Eigenvalue solver, which can result in significantly shorter solution times, and the Modeller now provides access to a range of additional features in Concerto's finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation engine. Among these is the ability to present frequency domain field plots over any regions of the model, and for any number of frequencies, from a single time domain analysis.

The Modeller now also supports features for the efficient simulation of complex materials in FDTD. One new facility allows the definition of lumped ports with frequency dispersive properties, based on the Drude, Debye and Lorentz models, providing a circuit element representation of discrete structures within complex materials.

The properties of metamaterials are being explored increasingly for use in microwave devices such as antennas and filters. Support for the simulation of these materials has been enhanced by allowing their representation by bulk constitutive properties. Since these types of materials generally rely on small-scale structure for their desired electromagnetic characteristics, their simulation can be very computationally intensive; using their bulk properties greatly increases the speed of simulation.

One common application of Concerto is in the design of antennas. A new tool in the Modeller enables swept far-field results to be generated by the FDTD solver in arbitrary directions, giving the ability to assess the broad-band far-field performance both on and off boresight.

The Concerto Manager has also been improved, and now features tabbed folder windows for simpler and faster navigation, together with an enhanced capability for running Concerto's frequency domain solvers in batch mode.

Underlying Concerto is an advanced and flexible scripting capability, allowing automation of almost all of the features of model creation analysis and post processing. The latest release extends the range of commands and features in the scripting language, and provides a redesigned and enhanced editor for creating and editing command files.

Concerto provides an FDTD simulator as standard, enabling users to quickly and easily model a wide variety of microwave devices such as antennas, waveguides, filters, cavities and resonators. Two further simulation options are available. A Method of Moments (MoM) analysis module uses a highly accurate formulation for the analysis of arbitrary geometries. Typical applications include radar cross-section calculation and the evaluation of antenna performance and placement on aircraft and ships. For designers wishing to characterize the performance of devices such as RF cavities and microwave resonators, Concerto offers a Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis module, which determines the eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors of resonant structures.

Concerto v7.5R1 is available in a number of configurations, including several low-cost versions, all of which use the 3D geometric Modeller for model build or import and employ the FDTD solver as standard. These versions can be upgraded to the full professional version at any time. Concerto ES is an entry-level 3D package which provides an ideal introduction for designers who are new to virtual prototyping software. Concerto 2D is an extremely fast 2D analysis module, which is primarily intended for designing components with axisymmetric geometries, such as circular and corrugated horn antennas. For designers of axisymmetric coaxial devices, such as connectors, Concerto AS offers a highly cost-effective means to optimize their electromagnetic designs very quickly.