VTB in the Classroom

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VTB in the Classroom
Sep. 18, 2003

• Antonello Monti
• Dept. of Electrical Engineering
• University of South Carolina
• Columbia, SC 29208

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Overview of the presentation

• Graduate Level Experiences
• Undergraduate Level Experiences
• Individual Directed Study

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ELCT891C Advances in Modeling and Simulation

• Main Topic Simulation Theory and Resistive
  Companion Approach
• Main Challenges
• Teaching about the math of a model
• Coding Issues

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The experience

• About 35 students joined the class
• It actually boosted the capability of the VTB
  students to write models
• It attracted students from other research groups

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The results

• More than 100 VTB models were created and tested
  (not all of them became part of the library)
• It helped us defining standards for the model
  development process

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ELCT753 Advanced Electrical Drive Class

• Main Topic Control of AC Drives
• Main challenges
• to show students implementation issues such as
  non-linearity of the control
• design trade-off such as inverter sizing

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ELCT753 Advanced Electrical Drive Class

• VTB used as a real Virtual Laboratory
• A wide set of schematic have been implemented to
  support the Homework
• The main structure of the HW was based on
  theoretical calculations to be verified in VTB
  simulations

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Examples

• Indirect Field Oriented Control
• Direct Field Oriented Control
• Different Options for Inverter Modulations
• DC Brushless
• AC Brushless

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Classical tests

• Step on the speed reference
• Step on the resistant torque

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Student design

• Tuning of the PI Controllers according to
  pre-defined specs
• Justification of the obtained waveform
• Comparison between theory and simulation results

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ELCT401 Control System Laboratory

• Main topic design of an autonomous vehicle with
  microprocessor control
• Main challenges
• Digital Control Issues
• System Issues

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Structure of the vehicle
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Final result
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The main control system
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The VTB Schematic
Standard PI
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The PIL Concept
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Schematic with PIL
PIL Block
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Results
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Timing issues
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The future

• A consortium among different universities has
  been recently defined around these concepts
• MIT
• Montana State University
• California State University (Chico)
• University of Nebraska
• USC

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The future

• We all share the concerns about teaching power
  electronics related courses (mostly when digital
  control is involved)
• We plan to create a Web-based support to share
  experiences such as the PIL to boost the teaching
  quality

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ELCT499 Individual Directed Study

• Design of VTB models and help files
• Main Challenges
• Teaching about writing scientific report
• Using the help files as way to check if the
  student really learnt the theory