PhD Student Tim Hughes, from the Geology and Geophysics Research group, has received multiple awards at recent conferences around the UK; including best presentations at the British Geophysical Association (BGA) Postgraduate Research Progress Meeting   and Near Surface Geophysics Group  (NSGG) graduate symposium in May, where he also recieved the “Best Paper” prize following his talk  the Marine Geophysics session entitled Environmental Controls on the Thermal Performance of High Voltage Cables under the Seafloor. More recently, Tim was awarded the best poster prize at the HubNet Smartgrids Symposium 2014.  by the conference chair, Prof. Tim Green from Imperial College London (pictured with him on the HubNet website). The prize was £50 worth of Amazon vouchers and box of chocolates. This year’s meeting was hosted by the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on the 9th and 10th of September. Tim attended the conference with some colleagues based at the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, on Highfield campus.

Tim, a postgraduate researcher studying environmental Controls on the State of HV Cables under the Seafloor, is funded through HubNet (which is itself is funded by EPSRC). Hubnet  runs an electrical engineering themed symposium every year that brings together researchers from departments all around the country. Usually, there are a series of talks given by established academics and industry representatives interspersed with a couple of poster sessions where HubNet funded PhD students and post-docs can showcase their work.

Tim says:

“A wide variety of research was represented on all aspects of electrical energy supply, from small scale house-to-house distribution, to the large, bulk transfer cable systems that are the focus of my research. It was interesting to put my research into context from a more general electrical engineering perspective; as I don’t often get a chance to discuss this aspect of my work being based at the NOCS!”

The aim of my research is to examine how heat from submarine high voltage cables is dissipated in the marine environment, and how the properties of the sediment in which the cables are buried affects the nature of this heat flow. This work employs finite element methods to simulate heat flow in and around high voltage cables buried specifically under the seafloor.