DoctorAlan Caughley

Dr Alan Caughley leads the CryoLab research team at the University of Canterbury. He has extensive experience in developing cryogenic refrigerators and refrigeration for superconductivity and small-scale nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen gas liquefaction systems.

Alan worked for 9 years in industry in product R&D, manufacturing and industrial design. He has 25 years of experience at IRL and Callaghan Innovation performing a mix of government research and consulting for industry.  His general mechanical engineering experience, combined with thermodynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling, has been used by firms for diverse applications such as non-Newtonian fluid flow, heat exchangers, pumps and Stirling machines.

His current research is on the refrigeration of superconducting aircraft motors for electric aviation. He is the leader of Workstream 2, Cryogenic Systems, for the MBIE project " High power electric motors for large-scale transport'. He has authored over 40 technical papers and reports and has 7 patents.