Teaching Electric Machinery and Associated Electromagnetic Fields-A Case for the Benefits of Academic Computing

Abstract

This paper describes three broad categories of benefits resulting from use of and access to personal computers (PCs) and work stations (WSs) in teaching electric machines and drives. This includes all the electromagnetic field aspects associated with such electromechanical energy conversion devices. The first category concerns benefits from use of computer graphics associated with computational electromagnetics. The second category of benefits involves quantification of machinery parameters and performance characteristics from computational electmmagnetics. Meanwhile, the third category concerns benefits from the use of computer simulations in the study of the now all-important power electronically controlled electric machinery drives, using time domain models in which all significant effects of both time and space harmonics are retained. The material presented here is given at Clarkson University at the senior undergraduate and first-year graduate levels.