SMARTLAB MAGNETIC: A MODERN PARADIGM FOR STUDENT LABORATORIES

[EN] Undergraduate laboratories should provide means to help the student visualize often complex concepts, to achieve a more lasting understanding and, thus, a more significant learning of the ideas presented in the lectures. However, the laboratories often require students to struggle with complex instrumentation operation and tedious data collection and processing that affect negatively their motivation and distract off the learning objectives. This paper introduces through a specific implementation a recent paradigm for student laboratories, designated as SmartLabs, as an effort to help overcome these drawbacks. SmartLabs Magnetic is a combination of existing magnetic circuits test equipment plus a versatile sensors set combined with a standard and affordable data acquisition card and a portable device App. SmartLab Magnetic collects data during magnetic circuits laboratory tests, processes this data to provide results more easily related to the basic concepts being tested and manages the data into reports that can be sent to the student e-mail account within the App. Students' opinions of the relevance, usefulness, and motivational effect of the new SmartLab Magnetic were very positive.Martinez-Roman, J.; Sapena-Bano, A.; Pineda-Sanchez, M.; Puche-Panadero, R. (2016). SMARTLAB MAGNETIC: A MODERN PARADIGM FOR STUDENT LABORATORIES. Sensors & Transducers. 197(2):58-66. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/99063S5866197

Electrical Machines Laminations Magnetic Properties: A Virtual Instrument Laboratory

"© 2015 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.” Upon publication, authors are asked to include either a link to the abstract of the published article in IEEE Xplore®, or the article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI).Undergraduate courses in electrical machines often include an introduction to their magnetic circuits and to the various magnetic materials used in their construction and their properties. The students must learn to be able to recognize and compare the permeability, saturation, and losses of these magnetic materials, relate each material to its specific properties, and understand the impact of these properties on the major performance metrics of electrical machines. This paper describes a new test equipment setup and lab guide that helps students achieve these learning goals. The test equipment consists of two transformers of grain-oriented and non-grain-oriented electrical steel, transducers, a data acquisition (DAQ) board and a PC-based virtual instrument. The virtual instrument shows voltage, current, and core flux time waveforms, the rms voltage versus current curves and, most importantly, the lamination material magnetic cycle. Students' laboratory work was organized into a series of experiments that guide their achievement of these magnetic materials-related abilities. Pre- and post-lab exams assessed student learning, which was shown to have increased significantly. Students' opinions of the relevance, usefulness, and motivational effect of the laboratory were also positiveMartínez-Román, J.; Pérez Cruz, J.; Pineda Sánchez, M.; Puche Panadero, R.; Roger Folch, J.; Riera Guasp, MV.; Sapena Bañó, Á. (2015). Electrical Machines Laminations Magnetic Properties: A Virtual Instrument Laboratory. IEEE Transactions on Education. 58(1):159-166. doi:10.1109/TE.2014.2348536S15916658