A New Laboratory for Hands-on Teaching of Electrical Engineering

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This paper describes an innovative laboratory for students in Electrical Engineering courses, which is recently established at the Energy Department of Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The main peculiarities of the lab are the high ICT content of each test rig, the multidisciplinary experiences, and the hands-on teaching methodology, allowing the student to have access in overall safety to many complex electrical/electromechanical systems. Currently, eight courses of Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering carry out in-class exercises and hands-on experiments in the new lab, serving over 200 students in total per year. The innovative lab also allows for external collaborations with companies and institutions for specific (and in some cases permanent) training offers, like a one-day per month LabVIEW course for faculty and staff members of Politecnico di Torino

H-Bridge Converter as Basic Switching Topology Workbench in Power Electronics Teaching

This article deals with an effective power electronics learning setup based on a Full-Bridge converter used to teach electrical energy conversion experimentally. In the proposed learning by doing methodology, the hardware and the software are properly mixed in order to obtain an easy-to-use experimental learning environment. In this paper, the H-Bridge is the fundamental brick to build students’ knowledge on the main topics of power electronics converter circuit in different operative conditions. This H-Bridge comes with a reconfigurable output LCL to achieve several basic DC-DC powerconverters topologies. Converter current and voltage switching behavior can be investigated using the proposed setup. Furthermore, the friendly hardware and software set-up allows studying the converter modulation and control techniques of the different power electronics circuits