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Director: Frédéric Sirois Codirector: Pierre Bernstein
End of posting : 30 August 2013
Department of Electrical Engineering, Thin Film Physics and Technology Research Group (GCM), Laboratory in electrical energy, CRISMAT (Caen, France)
Background: Undergraduate and masters in engineering physics, physics or materials sciences.
Skills and interests: Materials science, physics, electromagnetics, applied mathematics.
Personal qualities: Autonomy, critical thinking and creativity. Recommendations from referees (to be sent with the application form) should provide specific comments on each of these aspects.
Working language: Although the project can be conducted fully in English, a knowledge of the French language would help in the daily life, as École Polytechnique is a french-speaking institution.
Admission guide / Admission forms
The goal of this project is to develop extended phenomenological models for the resistivity of high temperature superconductors (HTS). These models should take into account many complex physical behaviors, such as magnetic field anisotropy and flux flow dissipation when the material is operated above the critical current. New models should consider the dependence on temperature, field and current density over a wide range of operation. They should be sufficiently simple to be used with numerical analysis tools, while being strongly supported by the underlying physics, in order to minimize the number of free parameters.
The targeted class of materials is that of thin film superconductors (ReBaCuO), which are available commercially in the form of tapes, generally used in high power applications. The work planned within this project consists of a mixture of experimental work (60%) and mathematical modeling (40%). The difficulty level of this project is high and it involves many experimental challenges.
Ecole Polytechnique has all experimental facilities required to undertake this project, but given the difficulty of the task, we plan many interactions with foreign partners, namely the CRISMAT laboratory (University of Caen-Basse Normandie, France) and the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), each one possessing expertise that complements that available in Montreal. It is planned that the thesis be conducted in co-supervision with the CRISMAT laboratory (France).
The motivations behind this project are i) to provide detailed performance specifications of high temperature superconducting materials to potential users, similar to what can be found in the semi-conductor industry, and ii) to create libraries of superconducting materials compatible with numerical analysis tools (finite element type), in order to facilitate the development of applications. These two aspects are important for attaining massive commercialization of superconducting materials.
A financial support is available for the sucessful applicant. The amount of financial assistance will be at the level proposed by École Polytechnique, i.e. in the range of 19000-20000 $ per year (Canadian dollars), for a duration of 3-4 years, in order to help you completing your thesis works efficiently.
Alternatively, a student who obtains his own scholarship (from NSERC or any other funding organim) will be granted a bonus (typically 25% of the amount of the NSERC scholarship).