Subject overview

Programme outline

Climate change threatens the stability of the world’s climate, its economy and population. The biggest single contributor to climate change is CO₂ emissions, more than two-thirds of which are related to human activity resulting from the way we produce and use energy.

A large proportion of CO₂ emissions resulted from the burning of fossil fuels over the past five decades and future projections show that this contribution will increase. Governments and industry worldwide are taking concerted action to tackle these problems and there is a growing demand for employees with good knowledge in the energy utilisation area.

This degree focuses on sustainability issues, covering topics on improved efficiency of conventional fossil fuel systems and renewable systems and their utilisation, energy storage and transport, energy and the built environment, energy auditing and sustainable transport. It aims to enhance both your theoretical knowledge and practical skills in advanced thermofluids and turbomachinery and places the wider implications of the subject in context by including a module on energy policy as applied to the issue of sustainability.

In addition, options covering further practical and theoretical topics allow for individual specialisation. The degree benefits from the research activity and associated facilities in the Thermo-Fluid Mechanics Research Centre.

Entry requirements

UK entrance requirements

A first- or second-class undergraduate honours degree in engineering, mathematics, physics or an applied science.

Overseas entrance requirements

Please refer to column B on the Overseas qualifications.

If you have any questions about your qualifications after consulting our overseas qualifications table, contact the University.
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk

Additional admissions information

We must receive your application by 1 August if you are a non-EEA student because this degree requires clearance by the UK Government Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS).

Related programmes

• Advanced Computer Science MSc
• Energy Policy for Sustainability MSc
• Human-Computer Interaction MSc
• Information Technology with Business and Management MSc
• Management of Information Technology MSc
• Managing Innovation and Projects MSc
• Technology and Innovation Management MSc

Fees and funding

Fees

Home UK/EU students: £5,500¹
Channel Island and Isle of Man students: £5,500²
Overseas students: £16,200³

¹ The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
² The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
³ The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.

Funding

The funding sources listed below are for the subject area you are viewing and may not apply to all degrees listed within it. Please check the description of the individual funding source to make sure it is relevant to your chosen degree.

Faculty interests

Research groups

Research is a core activity of the Department of Engineering and Design and is organised into four main groups. Our research often entails collaborations between the groups, as well as with other schools of studies at Sussex and external academic, institutional and commercial partners. For more detailed information, refer to the groups listed below and visit Department of Engineering: Research.

Dynamics, Control and Vehicle Research Group

This group is known internationally for its high-quality automotive research and fundamental work in dynamics and control. The group has a broad range of interests such as the convergence of control, non-linear dynamics, signal processing activities applied mainly to automotive engineering, and tribological research. It has attracted research grants from, and formed collaborations with, a variety of local, national and international public and industrial sources including EPSRC, Royal Society, Jaguar Landrover and SKF.

The primary focus is directed towards CO₂ reduction in transport through energy conversion efficiency improvements in engines, and through ‘lightweighting’ and drag-reduction technologies. For dynamics and automotive engineering this means reducing vehicle CO₂ emissions by improving powertrain and vehicle efficiencies particularly of internal combustion (IC) engines in conventional and hybrid electric vehicles, and by better understanding vehicle noise emissions to allow weight reduction.

This links directly to tribological research, which is at the forefront of the efforts to address the demands of the advances in material science, manufacturing, technology and the needs for better products, improved human life, and contributing to energy savings and a cleaner environment. The group researches areas including lubrication, dynamics of lubricated contacts, mechanical transmissions, contact mechanics and numerical modelling of lubricated contacts. 

Facilities include two engine-test cells, an engine-test laboratory, a full range of emissions measurement equipment, calibration equipment for engine control, and laser-based vibration measurement hardware. Specifically for tribological research, facilities include a PCS instruments optical interferometry test rig of EHD film measurement, an optical interferometry rig with a high-speed imaging system for dynamic testing of liquid films, impedance/gain-phase analyser, and a range of viscometers.

Faculty research interests include:

Dr Julian Dunne Engineering dynamics. Nonlinear system modelling and analysis; optimal control; vehicle, engine and rotor dynamics; noise, vibration and harshness applications in automotive and aerospace engineering.

Dr Romeo Glovnea Tribology, fundamentals of lubrication, experimental techniques in thin-film lubrication, mechanical transmissions (CVTs).

Dr Yevgen Petrov Modelling, numerical methods, analysis and optimisation of forced and self-excited vibration of jointed structures with friction, gaps and other non-linear interactions at contact interfaces.

Dr William Wang Machine condition monitoring, digital signal processing techniques, vibrational analysis and structural dynamics, wavelets and neural networks, measurement fault diagnosis.

Industrial Informatics and Signal Processing Research Group

Research in this group is focused on digital image processing; computer vision; optical computing, holography and communication; optical metrology; network and control theory; devices and computational techniques for medical and biological imaging and image processing, with a particular focus on cancer diagnosis and treatment.

These activities find application in a wide range of strategically important areas including product security, biometrics, automated face recognition, event detection and traffic monitoring. As an example, mobile-phone hardware and software has been developed to allow the phone to scan and recognise human irises using novel algorithms that have been patented and commercialised.

The Group is also engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations with the School of Life Sciences, the Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), clinical practitioners and companies in the medical device and medical imaging sectors. The research provides imaging biomarkers in cancerous tissue by wavelet filtering in an apparently normal contrast-enhanced CT image of the liver. We are currently extending the technique to 3D-texture analysis of the whole liver and lung. This research is the subject of a patent and commercialisation of the software.

Faculty research interests include:

Professor Chris Chatwin Advanced manufacturing: manufacturing and enterprise simulation and modelling, integrated total quality management. Fibre-optic communications. 

Security and surveillance systems: machine vision and image-processing, neural networks, mobile image acquisition, biometrics, image processing for medical diagnosis.

Dr Phil Birch Fibre-optic communications: photo-refractive holography, holographic optical memory, four-wave mixing, spatial light modulators, dynamic light-shaping elements, optical pattern recognition, optical filtering, electro-optic systems design.

Machine vision and image processing: Wiener filtering, foveating systems, mobile image acquisition, autonomous mobile robots, biometrics, image processing for medical diagnosis.

Dr David Li Finite-element analysis of waveguide devices; numerical modelling of optical communication devices; imaging and sensing systems; mixed-signal circuits, imaging processors, and firmware design.

Dr Tai Yang Networks and control systems for power generation control applications and in-vehicle control systems, control of hybrid and electrical vehicles, wind power generation and energy storage.

Dr Rupert Young Advanced manufacturing, fibre-optic communications, photo-refractive holography, holographic optical memory, four-wave mixing, spatial light modulators, dynamic light-shaping elements, optical pattern recognition, optical filtering, and electro-optic systems design.

Machine vision and image-processing: neural networks, Wiener filtering, foveating systems, mobile image acquisition, biometrics, image processing for medical diagnosis.

Sensor Technology Research Centre (STRC)

The STRC is a world-leading centre focusing on electric and magnetic sensor technologies and their applications. The focus is on the acquisition of weak electrical signals in challenging environments. The research attracts funding from EPSRC, TSB, the EU and a number of industrial collaborators.

The Centre has pioneered a new class of device with generic measurement capability, the Electric Potential Sensor (EPS). This has attracted considerable attention, winning a number of prestigious awards and gaining wide publicity in the technical press. The first generation of the EPS has been licensed to industrial partners and is now being marketed as an integrated circuit device.

Research activity includes the fundamentals of sensor operation, modelling of measurement scenarios and application specific projects. These applications are very broad and include electrophysiological monitoring, such as cardiac imaging and wireless linked electroencephalogram arrays, muscle and eye signal detection for human-machine interfacing and assistive technologies, security, forensics, geophysical measurements in collaboration with the British Geological Survey, materials characterisation for the semiconductor industry, and electric field detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals. 

The research also covers the area of mobile and wireless communications focused on improving capacity, power and spectrum efficiency, reliability, quality of service, and low complexity implementations. Work involves theoretical studies, simulations, and implementations using advanced software tools and digital hardware. The research impacts a number of important areas in the communications industry and practical systems in different sectors such as health, transport, energy, security and environment.

The Centre is well resourced with electro-magnetically shielded rooms, clean rooms, electron beam lithography fabrication, electronic systems spanning dc-to-microwave, and surface mount fabrication facilities.

Faculty research interests include:

Dr Falah Ali Mobile communications: digital communication techniques, multiple access, multiple antenna/MIMO, channel coding, co-operative communications, distributed video coding.

Wireless networks: adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks, vehicular communications, real-time and high-reliability communications.

Embedded digital systems: advanced communication algorithms on embedded digital hardware, DSP and FPGA. Development of testbed demonstrators with integrated networks.

Dr Ahmet Aydin Non-invasive sensors, electric field sensors for geophysical measurements, electric field detection of NMR signals.

Dr Helen Prance Electric field sensors for assisted living, human-machine interfaces, remote detection of life signs and nuclear resonance detection.

Professor Robert Prance Sensors for electric and magnetic field imaging, charge fingerprint imaging, non-destructive testing of materials, and low-noise instrumentation.

Thermo-Fluid Mechanics Research Centre (TFMRC)

The TFMRC is a dedicated research laboratory specialising in flow and heat transfer, and has substantial experimental and computational facilities. It has a proven track record in research, particularly in relation to gas turbine engines, and has attracted significant funding over previous years from industry, the European Commission and the EPSRC to conduct cutting-edge research on a wide range of engineering problems. It is now engaged in a major collaboration with GE Aviation.

The Centre has a significant experimental research infrastructure including a number of high-pressure air supplies such as the Rolls-Royce DART engine-driven compressor. It also hosts the DANTEC Centre of Excellence in Non-Invasive Instrumentation and has an array of state-of-the-art flow instrumentation including laser anemometry, particle imaging velocimetry (PIV), phase Doppler anemometry (PDA) and hot wire anemometry.

The Centre has expertise in temperature measurements including thermal imaging and liquid crystal measurements, as well as an in-house computational fluid dynamics code, SURF, which is an unstructured general-purpose compressible flow and aeroelasticity solver. Current experimental projects funded by GE Aviation are focused on internal air systems of gas turbine engines.

Faculty research interests include:

Dr Vasudevan Kanjirakkad Experimental aerodynamics/heat transfer, turbomachinery aerodynamics, rotating disc and swirling flows, turbulence and boundary layer transition, flowinstrumentation, sustainable energy.

Dr Christopher Long Experimental heat transfer and fluid-flow measurements, turbulence, application of optically based measurements, and sustainable and renewable energy.

Dr Hao Xia Computational fluid dynamics, computational aeroacoustics, large-eddy simulation, turbomachinery heat transfer, level set method.

Dr Zhiyin Yang Large-eddy simulation, flow stability and transition, turbulent combustion, two phase flow, gas turbine combustion system, heat transfer, and turbine machinery flow.

Careers and profiles

The continued demand for highly qualified engineers worldwide ensures that our graduates are able to choose professional careers in industry and academia.

Our Sustainable Energy Technology degree is aimed at engineers who are interested in developing their understanding and expertise in the technical aspects of energy sustainability. This is a critical field and one whose impact will increase with time. There is a strong demand for the training of engineers in both the energy supply and demand sectors. This need is expected to grow significantly in the coming years as the drive towards retrofitting the built environment gathers pace. Additionally, there is a sizeable focus on energy technologies to meet emissions targets and security-of-supply requirements.

School and contacts