Gordon Rawcliffe

Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe (born 2 June 1910 in Sunny Bank, Sheffield, † September 3, 1979 in Clifton, Bristol ) was a British electrical engineer and high school teacher and worked on the optimization of electrical machines.

Life

His parents were Rev. James Hindle Rawcliffe (1874-1920) and May Jane, née Thompson ( 1883-1940 ). When Gordon was two years old, the family moved to Gloucester. By the early death of his father, he received private lessons. Then he attended from 1921-23, the Kings 's School in Gloucester, 1924-1929 on St. Edmund's School in Canterbury and then Keble College, Oxford, with Prof. RV Southwell and EB Moullin. In South Wells 's advice, then he made a two-year training at the Metropolitan - Vickers Electrical Company ( Metrovick ). The next three years until 1938, he was there a development engineer.

He then took a job as a lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of Liverpool, where he worked with Prof. EW Marchant. After this retired, moved Rawcliffe 1941 to Robert Gordon's Technical College in Aberdeen as head of the Institute of Electrical Engineering. In 1944 he received his PhD here. Soon after, he moved to the University of Bristol in his beloved Gloucestershire. 1948-51 he was dean, forced him to a severe asthma at the break.

He dealt with asynchronous machines with pole-changing and their type of winding to a most possible small number of six terminals to switch to change the speed of the machine in operation. The problems encountered with harmonics and on the angular position -dependent torque changes he compensated by him 1954, the pole - amplitude modulation ( PAM). An example of the PAM represents the Dahlander winding, as found in the Dahlander motor use. The pole - amplitude modulation describes about the special Dahlander motor going beyond the principle and was initially used for small poles 8-10 poles, with power up to 75 kVA. Later, the principle of pole - amplitude modulation was extended to a beliebe number of poles for asynchronous machines.

In the late 1960s he was a consultant for several industry organizations and in 1975 he went into retirement. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972.

Publications

• The Theory of third- harmonic to the zero -sequence fields; in Proceedings
• The development of a new 3:1 pole -changing winding