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How can you make the most out of working remotely?

In March it came as a shock: sitting at home and working at home. What have we learned over the past period about what works and what doesn’t? And what can you learn from this for the future?

The pros and cons of working remotely appear to be closely related and are largely determined by the situation. The type of work, the mutual relationship between those who work together and the personality of the individual worker are determining factors whether online works well or not at all. How about that?

Soon during the corona crisis it became clear that much more is possible with working remotely than we thought. It helped of course that the online tools are a lot more stable and advanced than years ago. More is possible. Working from home also prevents the annoying and time-consuming traffic jam. And when you have quiet circumstances at home, it can help you work in a concentrated way. So for some, it can even increase productivity. Many have also experienced that this is not true for everyone. If it’s restless at home or the walls are coming up and you need real people around you, a few days at the office can be a blessing. For the time being we assume that even after the pandemic it will remain a combination of working at the office and at home. Hopefully it will remain possible for everyone to choose their own optimal balance.

Trainer Communication and leadership
Jaco Friedrich is competence owner of the Soft skills & leadership trainings.

Non-verbal communication

When are online conference calls less effective? Three factors determine this. First: when the relationship between the conversation partner is under pressure and conflict is (or already is) lurking, online works less well. After all, you miss a part of the non-verbal communication and therefore ‘feeling’ how someone is in it is a lot more difficult. Especially when you are in a video conference with several people. You are quickly too direct or not clear enough because you do not see how someone reacts to your message. It is less easy to make adjustments. This increases the risk of losing each other.

This also plays a role in situations where you have to be critical of each other’s work, for example at an important review or decision meeting. You are more likely to get into a discussion or people lose the connection and drop out. There is a risk that the quality of reviews will deteriorate as a result.

Secondly, with conference calls it is more difficult to respond to each other quickly, without talking through each other. Being able to connect to each other is less smooth online. For creative sessions it is therefore usually better to meet physically.

The third factor with conference calls is whether the participants already know each other. If that is the case, the relationship is good and there is mutual trust, then working online will also go a lot better. If that trust is not yet there and the participants are new to each other, group formation will be slower than normal. Another factor is that you miss more or less chance encounters. Moments when you ‘drop by someone’, listen in with others, tune something up or chat informally. The part of the information that you normally pick up in this casual way during the day is completely lost.

Camera and microphone on

What does this mean? Probably working remotely will continue to exist. So the question is how to get the most out of it and avoid the pitfalls. Here are a few practical rules. To minimize missing the non-verbal, I recommend always turning on the cameras as a starting point. In this way you are visible to the others and the others to you. This applies to all participants of the meeting. Possibly this gives bandwidth issues. However, do not, as a precaution, turn off your camera. Turn it on; you can always turn it off.

A next principle is that you do not mute your microphone when you are not talking. Turning it on and off is a threshold – no matter how small – to be able to react quickly to each other. So advice: leave it on. Unless your dog is barking or the neighbor is drilling.

To keep each other informed, it can be useful to start every morning with a ‘stand-up’. Everyone briefly tells you how it goes and what he or she is going to do that day. In this way you pick up on each other’s situation, who needs help or where you might be able to think along with each other. Moreover, it creates a moment to start your work day with a clear focus. That in turn helps to prevent your motivation from dropping. If you don’t have a team, an accountability buddy might be the solution. In plain Dutch: someone with whom you go through the day every morning and who keeps you on your toes (‘Did you finish this yesterday?’, ‘Have you already asked them for help or are you going to postpone that until tomorrow?’).

In addition, for everyone: create physical activity every day, make sure you have social contact, make sure you’re outdoors for a while, take a short break every hour and put your computer out of sight when you’re done with work. Actually, these are good routines anyway, so you can use this time to wear down some good habits.

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Experimental validation requires craftsmanship

Experimental techniques in mechatronics - Pieter Nuij
His two passions run like two red threads through his career. At Philips, at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at NTS, Pieter Nuij became one of the leading figures in experimental techniques and validation in mechatronics. In all these places he also profiled himself as a teacher. He now has his own consultancy firm, Madycon, and is one of the course leaders at the High Tech Institute’s ‘Experimental techniques in mechatronics’ training.

“It was a fantastic period.” With great pleasure and nostalgia Pieter Nuij looks back on his time at the renowned Philips CFT. “We were at the forefront of mechatronics, developing things that simply didn’t exist yet. We worked in a group that was bursting with energy and under the inspiring leadership of Jan van Eijk, Adrian Rankers, Herman Soemers and Maarten Steinbuch, among others.”

It is there, in the Philips offices at Strijp-S in Eindhoven, that Nuij can further explore his passion for which he laid the foundation during his graduation work at TU Eindhoven and during an earlier Philips assignment in the Optical Disc Mastering group: experimental techniques. “It is often very interesting to track, trace and troubleshoot”, says Nuij. “The combination of making measurements and analyzing why the system doesn’t do what is expected. You have to look broadly and open-mindedly identify and test all possibilities.” In addition, Nuij gets a lot of energy from transferring his knowledge. At CFT he stood at the cradle of the course ‘Experimental techniques and mechatronics’, provided by Philips’ training branch CTT.

This combination led Steinbuch to ask Nuij to join him on the transfer to the Eindhoven University of Technology when he was appointed fulltime professor in 1999. “Steinbuch was looking for someone to bring the experimental techniques in the lab back up to par and he thought that I should be the guy to do that,” says Nuij, who is hired as an assistant professor on the condition that he would obtain his PhD degree “within the foreseeable future”. Eventually Nuij does indeed succeed in doing so in 2007, “with two children on my knee, a full-time job, an understanding wife and Maarten as an inspiration”.

Trainer Experimental techniques in mechatronics
Pieter Nuij: “The validation of the design, including physical measurements, is very often sacrificed.”

 

Chores

Nuij remains at the TU Eindhoven until 2013. “I was able to fully satisfy my interest in vibrations and vibration analysis, and could completely lose myself in the education side – freshman lectures in signal analysis with two hundred people in the room, awesome.”

Ultimately, Nuij leaves because he does not agree with the way education is viewed. “To put it bluntly, I see universities as a supplier of two products: high-quality knowledge and damn good engineers,” he explains. “But what you saw is that the quality of research groups is measured much more by the number of publications than by the level of the graduates. Moreover, students were given less and less time to master the material. During that time I was also a study advisor for five years where I saw up close that students simply need time to digest material. You can’t just force it through.”

'More and more educational activities were considered chores because they stood in the way of the acquisition of projects.'

“In addition, there is no dual career system at universities,” Nuij continues. “The only way to get a promotion is through the scientific route, from assistant professor to associate professor. The strange thing is that the term ‘professor’ implies teaching is involved, but you saw that more and more educational activities were considered chores because they stood in the way of the acquisition of projects.”

 

Reluctance

Things are starting to frustrate him so badly that Nuij is switching back to industry, to NTS in Eindhoven. There too, training is an important part of his job description. And that training is necessary, says Nuij. “In the industry, developments are always pressed for time. This means that the factory acceptance test is done briefly at the very last moment, is curtailed or even skipped altogether. The validation of the design, including physical measurements, is very often sacrificed.”

Nuij also notices that even at a reasonably large party such as NTS, experimental techniques in mechatronics are a specialty that is not required forty hours a week. “Engineers who take it upon them part-time are eventually sucked in a different direction because there is more work to be done elsewhere. And with that, the focus disappears completely. Hiring an outside consultant is a good alternative, although companies feel it is more expensive. But that isn’t the case. The sooner you call in a specialist, the better. Fortunately, there are also plenty of companies that are serious about validation.”

“The other side to the story is that there is an increasing emphasis on simulation in the design process,” continues Nuij. “With that, developers hope to make their design first time right. In my experience, very good simulation specialists sometimes loathe validation tests. It can be confronting when such a test shows that something is wrong with your work. I regularly sense that that explains the reluctance to test it. That is a shame, because it decreases the ability to learn about the quality of your models. That feedback loop is often missing.”

'I don’t believe the software will ever become so good that a specialist becomes redundant.'

Simulation tools and digital twin packages are getting better every year. Does Nuij think that they ever will be sufficient to guarantee the quality of the design? “User-friendliness is indeed increasing. But with that, you run the risk of being lulled to sleep. I’m getting nervous when people say: “That software is so powerful, it doesn’t make mistakes anymore.” Then you are really missing the real picture. You will absolutely have to remain critical of the outcome, do not rely on it blindly. When using that software, you must also be able to test partial results in an experimental setting. It is quite possible that the software will become so user-friendly that those tests are very easy to perform. But you have to keep testing. I don’t believe the software will ever become so good that a specialist becomes redundant.”

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Students of training "Experimental techniques in mechatronics"

'In the training, we consciously work with outdated equipment.'

Priced competitively

Why is it so difficult to measure a mechatronic system? “That has a number of facets. First, it requires the right hardware,” Nuij replies. “Expensive items have to be bought. You can also go for cheaper devices, but they will give you questionable results and that will end up being much more expensive. You need to understand the hardware and know what you need when purchasing them. That already requires quite a bit of basic knowledge. And than you also need to use that equipment properly. There are many buttons that allow you to make big mistakes very easily. The results come out in 16-bit deep color, but that doesn’t say it’s any good.”

“The same applies to the required software,” Nuij continues. “The suites for vibration analysis are priced competitively; you are easily talking about thousands of euros. Much more than, for example, a Matlab license that can also be used much more widely. So it proves difficult to get approval from your boss. Here in the region, Mescope from the American Vibrant Technlogies is the most used vibration analysis software. But there are more, such as solutions from Siemens and the Danish Brüel & Kjaer.”

“Third, there is a good dose of craftsmanship involved. It is an exotic competence, but an indispensable one. You have to be able to do the manual work. You need a certain experimental skill to excite the construction in the right way, for example with a hammer with a built-in force sensor. You will also have to take into account that somewhere a connector is not working properly or that the accelerometer may not be properly secured. If you don’t know where to look, you can easily miss that sort of thing.”

Precisely this practical side is why the training ‘Experimental techniques in mechatronics’ of High Tech Institute, a continuation of the old CTT course, has been temporarily suspended. “You can’t do that online,” says Nuij, who is one of the teachers. “After corona we will continue.”

Pre-corona the course consisted of many hands-on hours. “We consciously work with outdated equipment. And the software still runs on XP,” laughs Nuij. “Those measuring systems still allow students to make mistakes. If they then notice that the result is different from what they thought, the thinking process starts. You hear the pennies drop everywhere and as a teacher you have reached your goal.”

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 9.6 out of 10.

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What an amazing year!

2020 will go into the annals of history as the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people have seen their lives disrupted, gotten sick or worse and suffered from mental health issues due to isolation and loneliness. All the mayhem caused by the pandemic, though, easily makes us lose sight of all the good things that happened this year.

The first, most obvious, one is the fact that the digital transformation of industry and society took a step function improvement. We’re all much, much better at conducting our work online and even if many of us would really want to travel more and meet people in real life (and actually shake hands or hug), we’re getting things done. Teams and individuals that were convinced that they needed to be onsite and in each other’s face to be able to do their job are now operating remotely and working from home.

One of the advantages is, of course, that the environment is doing better as air pollution levels are lower in many parts of the world. This is especially advantageous in areas that have snow in winter, as the whiter snow reflects more sunlight. Also, there are several reports of improved water quality in rivers and lakes. The reduction in carbon emissions and pollutants, according to a Wikipedia article, saved 77,000 lives over two months.

'Science and technology research is continuing to deliver great results'

Science and technology research is continuing to deliver great results. In the sunniest parts of the world, the cost of solar electricity is now below the cost of fossil fuels. This a decade or even decades ahead of earlier predictions. And of course, we’re not done. The improvements in solar are just continuing, driving down prices even further to the point that electricity will become close to free, according to some predictions.

Also, a recent article in Nature describes how the use of a deep-learning program by Google’s Deepmind solved protein folding in biology. A problem that for decades proved to be incredibly difficult to tackle by traditional algorithms was finally cracked by AI. And this is just one of the main benefits that AI is bringing to humankind.

Something that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly we were able to develop vaccines for Covid-19. This article shows a timeline starting with the genetic sequence of the virus being released by the Chinese authorities early this year and nine months later, there’s a vaccine (in fact, multiple!) available with mass distribution starting early next year.

As a space nerd, I was incredibly excited to see SpaceX sending people into space again. After the space race in the 1960s, interest in space took a nosedive, but I’m one of those that believe humans need to get off this planet and spread through the solar system and the universe. A catastrophic event on this planet won’t mean the end of humankind if we have people out there. To build up a space industry and capability, the first step is to have reliable and cost-effective rockets.

Other news that just blew me away this year is that scientists have now managed to reverse aging in cells, specifically in optic nerves and restoring sight in aging mice. Peter Thiel famously said: “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.” It looks like we’re on track to actually realize cell rejuvenation in bodies for real and if not abolish then at least delay death.

In my posts, I occasionally comment on the apocaholics in our society (and on the interwebs) who loudly claim that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. This is both factually incorrect and, in my opinion, morally wrong as it encourages a victim mindset. Humankind is incredible and has an amazing capability to respond to challenges put in front of it and overcome these. If nothing else, the year 2020 showed, once again, the value of science and technology, the creativity of humans as a species and that, despite everything life throws in our way, we still manage to improve things. I hope you spend Christmas celebrating our combined accomplishments and that you start the new year focusing your energy on what you’re going to do to contribute. Merry Christmas!

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How do I determine what is important?

A management consultant asks:

In my job, I deal with multiple projects from different clients. That variety makes the work exciting, but the pile of memos and reports is getting too much. When I go home in the evening, I haven’t been able to do what I had planned because of all the phone calls, emails and meetings. It’s very frustrating and I’m getting more and more often commented on not meeting deadlines. How do I create order out of this chaos?

'You must constantly be aware and active in setting priorities'

The communication trainer answers:

The theory about prioritizing is simple, but applying it is oh so tricky. Why? Because there are many factors at play at the same time that vary from person to person and from workplace to workplace, and are also constantly changing. Important factors are for example the dynamics of the work, the extent to which you can delegate, the level of the people around you and of course your own personality. Personal tendencies, that can make it difficult for you, are perfectionism (‘never finish, because it has to be 110 percent right’), pleasing (‘if I say I won’t do it, he won’t like me anymore’), disaster thinking (‘if I make a mistake, things will go terribly wrong, so I procrastinate’), enthusiasm (‘I like everything, finishing is something I am less good at’) and helpfulness (‘I like helping people, so I hardly get around to my own work’). All these personal factors in combination with all the constantly changing circumstances mean that you constantly have to be consciously and actively engaged in setting priorities.

How do you do that? In brief, the theory. The priority of a task is determined by the factor ‘importance’ and the factor ‘time’. Whether something is important depends primarily on your core task. What are you paid for? Suppose you are an architect, so working on the architecture of a machine is important. Arranging a meeting or making a calculation that perhaps an engineer could do is less important. Next, you check the urgency. Does it have to be done quickly or can it be left? And for how long?

Based on these two criteria, you decide how much time to spend on a task and when. Is it important and urgent? Then you do it now and well. If it is important and not urgent, you can schedule the work or make a start. Is it not important but urgent? Let someone else do the work or spend as little time as possible on it yourself. Not important and not urgent? Ignore them!

Check with yourself: what gives the most pressure, urgency or importance? Right, urgency. We are lived by the delusion of the day. We give in to pressure. Someone at your desk, an email, everything requires attention now. Some of that stuff you have to do to keep things going, but some of it is a waste of your time. The time you lose because of this, you lack in carrying out the important tasks, which also become urgent as a result.

Prioritizing therefore requires an active attitude and regularly selling no, but with a justification. The approach is as follows.

1) List for yourself the most important and difficult tasks that you really need to do.

2) Make sure you make time in your calendar to do these tasks and be prepared to defend this very hard.

3) Make sure you leave enough time for all kinds of ‘in-between’ things (thirty percent on average).

4) Be prepared to adjust your agenda and planning at any time if necessary.

One last piece of advice: make a realistic schedule and communicate what you can and cannot do. This will make you a reliable colleague. The world is not going to run according to your schedule. You will need to be continuously flexible, but never lose sight of your main goals.

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Activating the flywheel of change

Last week, we organized the sprint 19 reporting workshop of Software Center. The opening keynote by Frances Paulisch (Siemens Healthineers) was about the transition from a transactional business model to continuous value delivery to customers. The closing keynote of Aleksander Fabijan (Microsoft) discussed starting and scaling A/B testing. Though the keynotes focused on very different topics, they shared a common theme.

This theme was concerned with driving change and the challenge of successfully implementing the change. Both Frances and Aleksander raised the point that most changes in organizations touch many individuals, functions and departments, as well as numerous processes and ways of working. As I discussed in earlier posts, in most organizations, to change anything, you have to change everything. However, it’s impossible to change everything completely at the same time. And this is where I see many organizations get stuck.

The way out of this is to accept that all change will need to be gradual and that rather than accomplishing the change in one fell swoop, it will have to be a continuous process for an extended time. The analogy is that of a flywheel. Getting a flywheel from a complete stop to at least some rotation requires quite a bit of energy. Once there’s some motion, you need to keep exerting power to speed up. However, once it achieves more speed, it becomes easier and easier to maintain that speed. The question is how we achieve that in organizations. In my experience, there are three main aspects: showcase the value, increase engagement and build infrastructure.

First, showcasing the value requires finding a small scope where success is virtually guaranteed but where the value of the change you’re looking to accomplish is clearly demonstrated. As you initially have to realize all of this with a small team, it’s important to keep what you’re looking to accomplish as much as possible in your scope of control to minimize the risk of others torpedoing your efforts. For example, when running your first A/B experiment, pick a topic where opinions are highly diverse in the organization, ensure data quality from the A/B experiment and use this to engage with relevant stakeholders to show how the data from the experiment benefits the organization.

Second, once you have a successful case, engage the stakeholders that you need to convince to increase the scope of the change and show the real, concrete, tangible benefits you created in the first loop. Use this to increase engagement with the people that you need in the next iteration of the flywheel to create the next showcase. For example, when upping the release frequency of software on your way to DevOps, initially often the ability to rapidly resolve defects in the field can easily be used as a means to increase awareness and buy-in with relevant stakeholders.

Third, look for ways to automate some of the activities you’ve so far conducted through manual effort so that over time the cost of running through the iterations of the flywheel becomes lower. This is concerned with building the infrastructure for the change you’re looking to realize. For A/B testing, this may mean automating parts of the data collection pipeline and for adopting DevOps, this typically requires automating the CI/CD pipeline, as well as the test infrastructure.

Once you’ve gone through the first iteration of the flywheel, it’s basically rinse and repeat to take the next step and try to accelerate. It’s easy to get discouraged when trying this, but remember that flywheels accelerate very slowly and require a lot of energy to get moving at all. And initially, as everything needs to be done manually, the flywheel has a lot of resistance. With more and more of the infrastructure in place, it rotates easier and easier.

Many of the companies I work with struggle with realizing the changes required in their organization. Some oscillate between trying to realize a big-bang change and a complete deadlock where nothing happens. The most effective way to realize change is the persistent, perhaps slow, but continuous accelerating of the flywheel through showcasing value, engaging stakeholders and building infrastructure. Accept that it takes time and, because of that, start yesterday instead of tomorrow. Build your flywheel and get it spinning!

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Power electronics is never on its own

Electro-mechanic actuators, driven by highly efficient and accurate power electronic circuits, are the working horses of the industry. They determine the performance and quality of many industrial processes. High-Tech Systems spoke with Jeroen van Duivenbode, power electronics specialist at ASML, fellow at the Eindhoven University of Technology and trainer at High Tech Institute.

He needs a couple of moments to consider, but then he nods affirmatively: “Yes, there are still products circling the earth that I have designed.” Jeroen van Duivenbode may be working at ASML for close to a quarter of a century, his roots are in aerospace. This background sometimes give him interesting and radically different ideas in the semiconductor world.


Jeroen van Duivenbode: ‘The nice thing about power electronics is that it contains all subdomains of electrical engineering.’

After his MSc degree in power electronics at the Delft University of Technology, Van Duivenbode moved to France to work at – what was then called – Alcatel Espace in Toulouse, now part of Thales Alenia, where he designed power converters for satellite instruments. “That usually concerned radio transmitters and receivers that had to get their power from on-board batteries and solar panels”, he says. “The other side of my work involved simulation models. I did a lot of calculations on power systems for satellites and space stations. Nowadays, you have all kind of tools for that, but back then – in the late eighties and early nineties – we had nothing.”

After five years in France, Van Duivenbode made the switch to Norway, to Norspace, also a specialized company in space electronics. “Among other things, we built surface acoustics wave filters, small quartz-based components that we used to develop high-quality band pass filters. We also delivered systems to the Ariane 5 rocket. You can imagine that we were a little stressed out when her first test flight failed. Luckily, it wasn’t our fault; the malfunctioning was caused by an error in the software. Afterwards, our units were found back in the swamps of French Guiana. They still were operational, although they had fallen back to earth from four kilometers in the air.”

Cosmic radiation

Back in the Netherlands, Van Duivenbode starts working for ASML. In almost 25 years, he has become one of the go-to guys for power electronics. It’s an area of expertise that is certainly not of minor importance for the chip manufacturing systems from Veldhoven. All movements from, for instance, the wafer and reticle stages need hefty power levels, while margins are extremely small. “In the total error budget of the design we are talking about several percent. That translates to the requirement that we have a tolerance of about a tenth of an atom”, Van Duivenbode explains.

'We have to look further than just currents and voltages, but also simulate and calculate how errors seep through in the eventual system performance.'

As with ASML in general, the work of Van Duivenbode is dictated by Moore’s Law. ‘Furthermore, productivity is an important feature of ASMLs machines. A shorter scan time means faster movements and more power.” And a lot more power because there is a cubic relation between productivity and peak power: doubling the productivity requires a eightfold increase in power. “We have been through several of these doublings. In the old days, the electronics for all motions would fit in a shoebox, now every machine needs several cubic meter of power electronics.”

Because the margin of error is so small, even the faintest disturbance can seriously hamper the system. “Once we were working on a new generation of amplifiers. We had increased the voltage and pushed the mosfets to the limits,” Van Duivenbode recalls. “Within two weeks quite a lot of those mosfets had malfunctioned. We tried to find the cause and eliminated every possible explanation, from EMC to system failures, but everything seemed in order. Only one option remained: cosmic radiation.”


In the old days, the power electronics for all motions in an ASML machine would fit in a shoebox, now every machine needs several cubic meter of power electronics. Credit: ASML

In his earlier career, cosmic radiation was his everyday’s business, but in the semiconductor industry it took Van Duivenbode some efforts to convince his fellow engineers. “Nobody wanted to believe it. So we built a test setup with thousands of transistors. In the lab several broke down every week. Than, we moved the setup to the Municipal Cave in Valkenburg, underneath a thick layer of earth and limestone. After eight weeks, not a single transistor had failed. Since that experiment it is known in the industry that you have to take cosmic radiation into account, not only for big chips, but for small mosfets as well.”

Broad profession

Next to his work at ASML, Van Duivenbode is research fellow at the Eindhoven University of Technology, of course in power electronics. Since several years, he is also trainer at High Tech Institute, for the course ‘Actuation and power electronics’. “That training is interesting for everyone involved in high-precision systems. And that doesn’t necessarily mean nanometers as at ASML”, assures Van Duivenbode. “On micrometer scale it is just as important to see how you can fit the power electronics into your mechatronic system. And even when you talk about something ‘rough’ as the drive system of a car, you still have to make sure it is stable and reliable.”

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“Power electronics is a profession that doesn’t stand alone”, he continues. “It is always in the service of the system. No one will ask just for a circuit that can generate a couple of kilowatt. That is not interesting. ”

'The key is the whole system, and that is precisely the focus of the training.'

“The nice thing about power electronics is that it contains all subdomains of electrical engineering. Apart from all standard building blocks for power electronics, like mosfets, diodes and coils, you need to know about analog electronics as well, for accurate measurements, and about digital technologies and VHDL. Electromagnetic compatibility is a theme because high voltages and high currents play into the hands of failures. So you have to understand EMC, just as thermal design since components can heat up quickly. You have to cope with that heat. A heat sink might be the solution but than you have to be aware of capacitive coupling.”

And than there is reliability. “At those high powers, the electronics is pushed to its limits. The PCBs have to work hard, so they are more susceptible to failure”, says Van Duivenbode. “That means you got to know about reliability and lifecycle testing.”

Super conductivity

Van Duivenbode is one of multiple teachers of the training. Apart from power electronics and calculating on magnetic circuits – the parts that Van Duivenbode has taken on him – the course is also about actuators. Linear and planar Lorentz actuators, piezo actuators, they all are covered. Relatively new and promising are the so-called reluctance motors.

“That is a variety in which you let a current flow through a coil and use that to attract a piece of magnet steel, or soft iron”, Van Duivenbode explains. “Reluctance motors can deliver high power densities. The disadvantage is that those forces are highly non-linear and that the motor can only generate pull forces. At the university, in the group of Elena Lomonova, a lot of research is done to find a solution for this non-linearity. When that is found, the high power density makes reluctance motors very attractive for many applications.”

'The industry is not there yet, so superconductivity is still considered exotic in the training.'

Another emerging technology is super conductivity. “That is already used in, for instance, MRI scanners. There also has been a successful Dutch test to use super conductivity in underground power lines. The principal was proofed, but the project didn’t get any follow-up”, Van Duivenbode explains. “The first windmill with superconducting magnets has been built as well. Those magnets were in the rotor, so the whole superconducting system had to rotate with the blades. Quite an achievement, if you ask me. The next step is to make it economically feasible; someone has to take that step and invest in it.” The industry is not there yet, so superconductivity is still considered exotic in the training.

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.5 out of 10.