In the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, through our staff's personal commitment to research, we aim at achieving excellence in science and engineering that contributes to the well-being of society. Via our inter-disciplinary approach to research, our Department provides a creative and supportive academic environment in which new ideas are created and flourish.
Our students benefit from high-quality, up-to-date scientific knowledge offered to them by our specialist, research-active lecturers. All our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as any short courses offered by the University of Chester are linked to research informed and industry engaged teaching.
A range of research areas and topics within the department are listed below. Many of these are inter-disciplinary and in collaboration with academic/industrial partners in the UK and overseas.
Terahertz Measurement Centre (TMTC)
Dr Bin Yang
Terahertz (THz) band, loosely defined in the electromagnetic frequency range from 0.1 to 10 THz, has demonstrated extraordinary prospects in the past ten years due to its attractive applications in material, chemical, communication and life sciences. TMCT supplies a sustainable commercial measurement and analytical service to academic and industrial customers from both domestic and international markets. The centre focuses on many THz cross-disciplinary themes, especially those higher priority research strategies listed by EPSRC and BBSRC: 1) Functional material characterisation for example multiferroics and graphenes; 2) Time–resolved spectrometry for example curing dental cement mixtures in a research for phasing out of mercury-based treatments ; 3) Molecular vibrations and proteins folding/misfolding, offering major advances in bioscience including the grand challenge of healthy ageing for example Alzheimer’s disease; 4) The control of crystallisation and polymorphism which is of utmost importance to the pharmaceutical and food industry where a drug or ingredient candidate’s success is not only determined by its chemical properties but also crucially by its physical properties.
Simulation and Modelling for Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering Research Group (SMPE)
This research group has Simulation and Modelling capability in the areas of:
The group has access to a High Performance Cluster with 17 nodes and 312 cores.
The group has a track record in:
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Figure 1 A Numerical Electromagnetics Code (NEC) simulation for a multiple probe array with the aim to take a ‘snapshot’ measurement for a gird of test points concurrently. The source antenna is visible at the top of the plot, with the cross-section through the generated E field clearly showing the toroidal pattern of intensity for a radiating electric dipole. Individual antennas comprising the receive array are visible at the bottom of the plot, parallel to the y axis. Those antennas in the plane of the plot clearly show interaction with the E field as a localised disturbance in the field intensity. |
An Exciting New Nano-electronics Research Initiative
The field of Nanoelectronics is concerned with the materials, devices, circuits and systems relevant to contemporary and future integrated circuits (ICs) with feature sizes at the nanoscale i.e. nano-chips. Modern ICs which are the ‘electronic brain’ and memory, inside mobile phones, laptop and desktop PCs are comprised of billions of Field Effect Transistors (FETs). The gate length of such an FET ~ 10 nm, constituting an in service nano-device. The gate is the terminal that controls the current flow through the channel from the source to the drain, thus the FET acts as a switch. At this length scale, where a FET consists of few hundred atoms, quantum mechanics must be applied to decipher the operating principles and the engineer must draw upon the expertise from Condensed Matter Physics.
The group is investigating numerically the electron flow in exotic topological insulator materials which can be incorporated in the channel of a FET.
The group is also examining, via computer simulation, the revolutionary Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QDCA) devices and circuits, a brand new paradigm for computer architecture. QDCA are transistorless and the charge configuration of quantum dots encodes binary information
The group will be taking on a self-funding PhD students in the projects and presently there are three PhD and one MRes students in the Nanoelectronics research field.
Nanoelectronics Research Inspired BEng Projects
