Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe

Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe (born June 2, 1910 in Sunny Bank , Sheffield , † September 3, 1979 in Clifton , Bristol ) was a British electrical engineer and university professor and dealt with the optimization of electrical machines .

Life

His parents were Rev. James Hindle Rawcliffe (1874–1920) and May Jane, b. Thompson (1883-1940). When Gordon was two years old, the family moved to Gloucester . He received private lessons until his father's untimely death. He then attended from 1921 to 1923 the Kings's School in Gloucester, then 1924–1929 St. Edmund's School in Canterbury and then Keble College in Oxford, at RV Southwell and EB Moullin. On Southwell's advice, he then completed a two-year training course at the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company ( Metrovick ). For the next three years until 1938 he was a development engineer there.

He then accepted a position as a lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of Liverpool , where he worked with EW Marchant. After this retired, Rawcliffe moved to Robert Gordon's Technical College in Aberdeen in 1941 as director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering. In 1944 he obtained his doctorate here. Soon after, he moved to the University of Bristol in his beloved Gloucestershire . 1948–51 he was dean until a severe asthma illness forced him to take a break.

In asynchronous machines he dealt with pole switching and the type of winding in order to be able to change the speed of the machine during operation with the smallest possible number of six connections for switching . He compensated for the problems with harmonics and changes in torque that were dependent on the angular position with the Pol-Amplitude-Modulation (PAM) developed by him in 1954 . An example of the PAM is the Dahlander winding as it is used in the Dahlander motor . The pole amplitude modulation describes the principle going beyond the special Dahlander motor and was initially used with a small number of poles of 8 to 10 poles, with powers of up to 75  kVA . Later, the principle of pole-amplitude modulation was extended to any number of poles in asynchronous machines.

In the late 1960s he became a consultant for several industrial organizations and in 1975 he retired. In 1972 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .

Publications

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

literature

• Kurt Jäger, Friedrich Heilbronner: Lexicon of electrical engineering . 2nd Edition. VDE-Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 , p. 354 .