Distributed and lumped-parameters formulation of electromechanical systems

Undergraduate courses in electromechanical systems are usually oriented toward circuits representation of electrical and mechanical components of the system, being the materials reduced to the rigid body cases. However, the common use of personal computers and the availability of user friendly numerical software tools to solve partial differential equations provide the opportunity to generalize a different pedagogical approach to the distributed and lumped-parameters formulation of electromechanical systems. Besides, the use of these tools makes easy extend this modeling approach to other physical phenomena like thermal, continuum media and fluid. In this paper one underlines some guidelines to teaching continuum electromechanics in undergraduate courses. Also one shows some analogy considerations to extend the study to other physical phenomena. The paper underlines the relation between distributed and lumped-parameters systems as different approaches of the same physical reality. Some experiments for laboratory support are also proposed and discussed.