Electrical Machines Laminations Magnetic Properties: A Virtual Instrument Laboratory

Abstract

Abstract-Undergraduate courses in electrical machines often include an introduction to their magnetic circuits, and to the various magnetic materials used in their construction and their properties. The students must learn to be able to recognize and compare the permeability, saturation and losses of these magnetic materials, relate each material to its specific properties, and understand the impact of these properties on the major performance metrics of electrical machines. This paper describes a new test equipment setup and lab guide that helps students achieve these learning goals. The test equipment consists of two transformers of grain-oriented and non-grain-oriented electrical steel, transducers, a data acquisition (DAQ) board and a PC-based virtual instrument. The virtual instrument shows voltage, current and core flux time waveforms, the rms voltage versus current curves and, most importantly, the lamination material magnetic cycle. Students' laboratory work was organized into a series of experiments that guide their achievement of these magnetic materials-related abilities. Pre-and post-lab exams assessed student learning, which was shown to have increased significantly. Students' opinions of the relevance, usefulness and motivational effect of the laboratory was also positive.

Remote Hardware Controlled Experiment Virtual Laboratory for Undergraduate Teaching in Power Electronics

“…Deep understanding of the field behavior and the use of electromagnetic compatibility instruments such as network analyzers, spectra, and oscilloscopes is made possible. The author of [9] reported a guided experiment to study the magnetic properties of electrical machines. One of the outstanding advantages of the virtual laboratory is the sharing of facilities among institutions.…”

“…The graphic interface display of the VPEL on the client side is implemented using Flash [9] and HTML [10]. Figure 9a,b shows the display panels of the oscilloscope, signal generator, and power supply, which are the key measurement tools in the experiment.…”

Experiment Information System Based on an Online Virtual Laboratory

“…In recent years, there have been two main viewpoints on implementing virtual laboratory systems: web-based remote laboratories [7,8,[15][16][17] and fully software-based virtual laboratories [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. A remote laboratory tries to carry out online experiments by operating physical equipment from a distance.…”

“…Hence, this paper primarily discusses fully software-based virtual laboratories. A number of studies have elaborated their methods to implement virtual laboratories [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] in various educational applications. Few virtual platforms aim to realize generalized software that may be applicable to multiple disciplines.…”

“…The Virtual Laboratory for Robotics (VLR) [9] is a classic example of robot simulation. More recently, an instrument-based virtual laboratory [21] simulates an environment for electromagnetic phenomena. Work in Reference [22] realized a cloud-server-based virtual laboratory used in network security teaching and practice.…”