Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory PhD Students Win Best Presentation Awards in the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Dielectrics

Two PhD students from the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory (TDHVL) within the Electrical and Power Engineering EPE research group have won two of the three awards for best presentations at the 2018 International Conference on Dielectrics ICD in Budapest, Hungary.

Istebreq Saeedis’s research paper ‘On The Design of The Structure of Epoxy Resin Networks’ reported a novel method for designing the molecular structure of epoxy resin systems. This study proposes a method to control the properties of epoxy resin system to produce materials with increased breakdown strength. This approach is of potentially very important because it may allow materials to be designed with controlled properties to suit particular applications.

Allison Shaw’s keynote presentation was entitled ‘The dielectric effect of xylene on an organoclay-containing composite’ which presented the results of an avenue of work she started exploring after realising that the effects of any solvent remaining in the sample due to incomplete drying from the nanocomposite synthesis was poorly understood. In the past, the effects of the solvent may have been wrongly attributed to the presence of the nanofiller and this work also uncovered an interesting synergistic effect between the solvent and the nanofiller in terms of the dielectric properties of the nanocomposite.

Other staff and students from the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory presenting their work at the conference included a the keynote talk presented by Dr. Ian Hosier on ‘Polymer Blend Systems for HVDC Cable Applications’ and Xinyu Wang delivered a paper on the ‘Effect of Surface Functionalization on the Dielectric Properties of Polypropylene Aluminium Nitride Nanocomposites’. Furthermore, Professor Paul Lewin and Dr. Thomas Andritsch both from the University of Southampton were actively involved in the organization of the conference itself.