The UK research council has provided funding to six leading UK universities for a four year research programme called Vehicle Electrical Systems Integration (VESI). The project is supported by 20 industrial partners (e.g. JLR, Tata, ABB, GE, Dynex, Axeon) and you will find more information about the research programme at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/research/power/vesi

Part of the programme is to establish a report that summarises physical effects in multi-physics software packages available today that so far have been simplified, or neglected, or are simply not known to software packages developers. EPSRC, UK’s academic funding body identified the need to collect these data to generate precise models so that accurate simulation results and reliability data can be obtained. Although today’s commercially available multi-physics software packages produce good results, they tend to lag in accuracy when simulating high power dense power drive trains for electric vehicles. That is because high integration results in much more complex physical interactions between electrical, mechanical and thermal effects.

The report will guide the UK research council for future funding to help software companies to establish more accurate models and to develop and validate new models for power converters and electric drives simulation.

As a user of multi-physics software packages we like to ask you to shape the report. We set-up a questionnaire (25 questions ~ 10 minutes) which you can access on the next page.

We appreciate your time and we like to thank you in advance for your contribution. You will be informed once the report has been completed.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at:


Prof. Volker Pickert                                                                                  
Newcastle University                                                                              
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering                                
Merz Court                                                                                                  
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK                                                                      
NE17RU                                                                                                  
Email: volker.pickert@ncl.ac.uk                                                           
Tel: +44-191-222-6684
Website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/eee/staff/profile/volker.pickert                                                                           

Dr. Xueguan Song
Newcastle University
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Merz Court
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
NE17RU
Email: xueguan.song@ncl.ac.uk
Tel: +44-191-222-7197
Website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/eee/staff/profile/xueguan.song