Promoting condition monitoring and diagnostics of electrical insulation in undergraduate capstone graduation projects

High-voltage engineering is not usually an appealing area to undergraduate students because it is commonly perceived as a classical area of electrical engineering. Moreover, high-voltage (HV) engineering requires an HV laboratory, which is not usually available in universities because of high cost. In addition, several universities that already had HV laboratories decided to close them and use the space for more cutting-edge technology. Consequently, most of the researchers who did their PhDs in HV engineering were forced to switch their research work to different areas or concentrate on simulation-based research projects. This resulted in fewer students being attracted to HV engineering at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In this article four capstone graduation projects presented at the American University of Sharjah in the last nine years are discussed, each related to condition monitoring and diagnostics of electrical insulation. They required minimum HV infrastructure and, hence, could be implemented at modest cost.