68 Located in the UK industrial powerhouse of Milton Keynes, NEX Power Ltd., formerly known as Samad Power, is a developer of gas microturbinebased technologies. The company had its genesis at Cranfield University (the birthplace of many other uncrewed systems and related innovators throughout Britain), where the NEX Power CEO Seyed Mohseni started a journey that has secured over £5m in funding for its r&d so far – although it began in a somewhat different place to that, which we typically focus on. “Changing our name to NEX Power came with a change of business strategy, although the core technology is still continuing the r&d from my doctorate from Cranfield; the subject being how to achieve both low-cost development and manufacturing of gas microturbines, for power generation as well as combined heat and power [CHP] applications,” Mohseni explains. The main character of Mohseni’s PhD thesis was a 3 kW microturbine designed to produce power by running on natural gas. Its exhaust gases would be run via a heat exchanger, which would then enable heating for a building, whether for water or space heating. The approach was one of several competing micro-CHP solutions, supported by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Feed-in Tariff scheme for boosting small-scale renewable energy tech uptake. “One problem with using that 3 kW CHP boiler microturbine was that, compared with a normal gas boiler, it would likely be three to five times more expensive, principally because you’re applying jet propulsion to the low-cost gas boiler industry. The Feed-in Tariff Rory Jackson investigates a novel micro-turbogenerator design, aimed at reducing microturbine development and build costs to competitive levels for hybrid-power UAVs, electromobility, and combined heat and power Turn up the heat August/September 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology NEX Power’s 15 kW GenSet is a gas microturbine, integrating an alternator for both starting and electricity generation on a wide variety of fuels (All images courtesy of NEX Power Ltd.)
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