Using a Virtual Platform for Teaching Electrical Machines and Power Systems Courses

Study of electrical power systems and electric machines requires a good background on advanced calculus and electromagnetics. But many engineering and engineering technology students lack the required background, and as a result, they have difficulties to learn these subjects. Another issue for electric power system or electric machines students is finding the textbook problem solutions through the use of routine problem-solving techniques, such as equations and formulae. But the students’ reliance on formulae and routine use of techniques in problem solving too often leads to poor performance in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, the laboratory sessions in any engineering program particularly in electrical power engineering are critical as these labs are designed for students in accordance with theoretical course work. Setting and running electric machines, energy conversion and power systems laboratories put several challenges and requirements, such as cost, space, limited equipment access, equipment size and similarities with real equipment, safety, students’ supervision, etc. Virtual laboratories can become important components of the teaching process, because using them some of the above challenges can be avoided, while several experiment-oriented problems can be solved easily and also from the distance. Software based laboratory experiments have become current day need due to its impacts on flexible learning of students and understanding abilities. Also, the students’ lack of solid comprehension of mathematical and/or physics concepts results in wasted time during laboratory experiments, misinterpretations of experiment results and data, etc. This motivation deals with simulation of electric machine and power system experiments which are part of lab work at undergraduate Electrical Engineering level using Laboratory LabVIEW and MATLAB/Simulink software packages. The selection of these software packages among others is based in part on their strong graphical interface capabilities, symbolic computation, user friendly tools and highly understandable approach. Moreover, LabVIEW and MATLAB based electric machines and power systems laboratories and simulation experiments are economical and user friendly. We strongly believe that graduates trained in such virtual laboratories are better trained when they enter the job market. This paper will discuss design and development of interactive instructional virtual instrument (VI) modules for studying the most common experiments in electric machines and power systems laboratories.