Modern technologies for experimental education in industrial electronics and electric drives

This paper describes the methods used by the teaching group of power electronics and electrical drives of Electrical Engineering and Automation Department of Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa (Portugal) to increase the effectiveness of experimental training in the areas of industrial electronics and electric drives. It is well known that the interest of new students for electrical engineering courses has decreased, all over the world, and some proactive actions have to be done by engineering schools in order to increase their attractiveness. The approaches followed by this teaching group were intended to improve the student enrollment and to develop sustained competences in the electrical engineer profile by a fair balance between didactic tools and industrial equipment. A judicious introduction of industrial material in laboratory work can be both stimulating as well as a valuable link to the real world. The versatility and moderate cost of modern integrated power electronics modules, the capacities of modeling and control dedicated software, modern digital signal processors and also the judicious use of industry grade equipment, opened new challenges in experimental training. This set of equipment allows to build a variety of configurable open systems, with more or less complexity, that can be explored at different levels of power electronics and electrical drives, from the power stage to the control functions, as exemplified in this paper