What do Electronic and Electrical Engineers do?
Population growth, sustainable energy, healthcare, urban migration and an ageing population are some of the biggest challenges facing society today. Academics from the Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering at Birmingham discuss their research relating to these issues and some of the ways that they are helping to tackle them:
Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality
- Training medics and armed forces for medical emergency response situations
- Bringing historical and archaeological sites back to life – above and below water
- Helping patients’ recovery in intensive care
Power Conversion Systems
- Part of many things we use on a daily basis, like mobile phone chargers and electric trains
- New power conversion systems will make them more convenient to use leading to an improvement on the use of our power sources and a better quality of power for home and businesses.
Space Weather
- Solar storms can affect the radio systems and technology on which our society is so heavily dependent
- A solar storm in 1989 left 6 million people without power for 9 hours
- There is a 50% probability that one of these events will occur in a 50 year period
Railway Engineering
- Bringing new digital technology to the world’s railways
- Improve the customer experience, increase the capacity, cut carbon emissions and reduce the cost
- Simulation techniques allow us to see if new technologies are effective and worth implementing
Autonomous Vehicles
- We are witnessing a revolution in car technology
- Autonomous vehicles are seen as a potential answer to the challenges of an ageing population, increasingly dense urban traffic and improving road safety.