Electrical Engineering Concept Demonstrations And Laboratories Using A Power Relay System

Recent issues within the power industry, such as deregulation and California’s energy problems, are creating a renewed interest in careers within power engineering careers. Many schools are seeing increases in the number of undergraduates in power engineering elective courses. However, at many universities the field of power engineering is seen as a mature field with no exciting problems to solve or work on in the 21 century. This paper and presentation will outline a joint effort between Mississippi State University and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) to develop several demonstrations for introductory EE courses and laboratories for the first power engineering course using a microprocessor controlled relay set-up. The goal of the project is to provide other universities with a set of demonstrations and laboratories to help integrate other electrical engineering concepts into the power curriculum to show students that power really involves many areas of core electrical engineering. Two developed laboratories will be discussed and future plans for other demonstrations and laboratories will be outlined. Goals of the Collaboration The decline in university support for power engineering programs across the U.S. has caused a decrease in available engineers with training on basic principles in power engineering. Additionally many entering engineers perceive power engineering as a mature field that does not relate to new topics such as computer engineering, digital signal processing, and fiber optics communications. While electric utilities have had lower levels of hiring over the last ten years, support industries for electric utilities are becoming more prevelant on campus. Companies need students with a strong background in power engineering fundamentals coupled with other areas of expertise such as controls, computers, electronics and communications. Some high-tech power-related companies such as SEL are finding it more and more difficult to identify qualified engineers for their entry level positions. In some cases, power-related industries hire non-power engineers and provide training on power topics to bring entry-level engineers up to speed. In the case of SEL, the challenge is even tougher as they try to identify candidates with additional training related to protection and relaying. SEL has been supportive of educational initiatives to help power programs across the U.S. and world. In the summer of 2000, SEL sponsored a teaching workshop at the IEEE Power Engineering Summer Meeting to help power faculty be better teachers and hopefully attract more students. Page 876.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education Faculty at MSU and engineers at SEL discussed how to solve the issues of workforce as well as educating all electrical and computer engineers about the next-generation of power challenges. Microprocessor-controlled relays and other protection equipment manufactured by SEL provide an excellent teaching platform for both power engineering as well as electrical engineering classrooms. Using a protection set-up, faculty members could demonstrate many key points in fundamental electrical engineering courses relating to topics such as circuits, signal processing, communications, microprocessors, and power engineering. Also using this set-up, laboratories could be performed to demonstrate concepts relating to circuits, electronics, computer engineering and signal processing. The educational goal for these demonstrations and labs is to provide a state-of-the-art, realistic platform for applications of electrical engineering and computer engineering concepts. The goal for SEL would be demonstration to a wide range of electrical and computer engineering students the high tech side of power engineering helping to increase interest in power engineering upper-level classes and eventually creating more power engineers. Besides these lower level demonstrations and labs, advanced labs and demonstrations could be developed for senior and graduate level classes to provide aids to faculty for advanced topics in protection. Relay Test Equipment SEL donated a relay test system to Mississippi State in the fall of 2001. The donation included two SEL-351S relays, a SEL-AMS Adaptive Multichannel Source, SEL-5401 software package, and cables and connectors for the system. The donated equipment set is valued at approximately $15,000. SEL personnel also provided MSU with training on the system. A picture of the set-up is shown in Figure 1. The relays and source are connected to a computer for configuration, demonstration and laboratory experiments. Figure 1: Relay Test System in Laboratory P ge 876.2 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education Figure 2 Interconnection diagram of testing system Figure 2 shows a block diagram of the arrangement for the test set-up.