Development of Wind Turbines Prototyping Software Under Matlab/Simulink® Through Undergraduate Student Projects

International audienceElectrical Engineering and more particularly Power Engineering at the undergraduate level is facing a crisis at many French universities in terms of enrollment. One reason is the attraction of “newer” areas like computer engineering, which seem to excite the students more and pay higher starting salaries. In this difficult context, a significant educational investment is necessary to excite the students and entice them into Power Engineering. An area that students universally find interesting is alternate energy systems based on a renewable energy supply like wind. What is interesting with this area is that it includes the fundamental material that already exists in many energy conversion courses. Therefore, in this paper the authors present the development of a wind turbine prototyping software under Matlab/Simulink® through undergraduate student projects within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Professional Institute (IUP GEII) at Amiens, France [1]. This software was developed by a group of three students of the Institute third and final year. It was then used by another group of three students of the Institute second year to realize a wind energy system model

Digital signal processing: the impact of convergence on education, society and design flow

Design and development of real-time, memory and processor hungry digital signal processing systems has for decades been accomplished on general-purpose microprocessors. Increasing needs for high-performance DSP systems made these microprocessors unattractive for such implementations. Various attempts to improve the performance of these systems resulted in the use of dedicated digital signal processing devices like DSP processors and the former heavyweight champion of electronics design – Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The advent of RAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays has changed the DSP design flow. Software algorithmic designers can now take their DSP algorithms right from inception to hardware implementation, thanks to the increasing availability of software/hardware design flow or hardware/software co-design. This has led to a demand in the industry for graduates with good skills in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This paper evaluates the impact of technology on DSP-based designs, hardware design languages, and how graduate/undergraduate courses have changed to suit this transition

A 68000-based produce sorting microcomputer : graduate clinical research master\u27s report

This report discusses in great detail the various research, design, and development stages of the Produce Sorting Microcomputer developed for HAGAN ENGINEERING Inc. The two-semester Clinical Research project has been approved by the graduate committee at the School of Engineering at the University of the Pacific and fulfills the requirements towards a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering. The project was selected based on its complexity, feasibility, the time span it required to complete, and its relevance to the area of real time microcomputer design. In addition, the design constraints and specifications were to be dictated solely by HAGAN ENGINEERING Inc. and all further modifications were to be discussed and approved by HAGAN. These limitations created a professional industry-like atmosphere, which is one of the goals of the Clinical Research Program. A brief User\u27s Manual will accompany the MC68000 board; it will contain all the vital information about the system that a programmer or a technician might need to understand the system. The manual wall contain the complete circuit schematic, a parts list, general design features, and all the software properties of the system (memory map, interrupt tables register map)

Analysis on the Possibility of RISC-V Adoption

As the interface between hardware and software, Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) play a key role in the operation of computers. While both hardware and software have continued to evolve rapidly over time, ISAs have undergone minimal change. Since its release in 2010, RISC-V has begun to erode the industry aversion to ISA innovation. Established on the principals of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), and as an open source ISA, RISC-V offers many benefits over popular ISAs like Intel’s x86 and Arm Holding’s Advanced RISC Machine (ARM). In this literature review I evaluate the literature discussing: What makes changing Instruction Set Architectures difficultWhy might the industry choose to implement RISC-V When researching this topic I visited the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), INSPEC (Engineering Village), and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library databases. I used the search terms, “RISC-V”, “Instruction Set Architecture”, “RISC-V” AND “x86”, and “RISC-V” AND “Instruction Set Architecture”. This literature review evaluates 10 papers on implementation of RISC-V. As this paper was intended to cover recent developments in the field, publication dates were limited to from 2015 to present

WEB BASED ENGINEERING EDUCATION

The use of Internet for distance education has received increasing attention over the past few years. But the real challenge of adapting this technology for engineering education is to facilitate the laboratory experiments via Internet. This paper discusses the software and hardware requirements of virtual courses/laboratories to provide interactive environment for designing and conducting classes/experiments. The examples provided demonstrate a virtual laboratory for Electrical Engineering courses and shows how similar laboratories can be implemented for other courses like Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and System Engineering etc. In a traditional university environment, virtual labs can also improve the Engineering curricula in a cost effective way by establishing a timely connection between theory and practice. The obstacles in introducing engineering education via digital media are also discussed

Teaching design of complex interactive systems:Learning by Interacting

In this paper we document our experiences in developing and teaching design classes. The courses we teach, and that we still try to improve and try to keep up with state of the art design approaches, originaly developed in close cooperation with colleagues like Michael Tauber and Steve Guest. Only in a way of cooperation we will be able to improve and to produce state of the art education. Teaching interactive systems design in our situation means teaching various groups of university students, as well as groups of experienced practitioners, in most cases stemming from a variety of disciplines like software engineering, electrical engineering, cognitive psychology, and AI. Our current design classes are organised in such a way that students are forming a design team with subteams for different specialist design methods like task analysis, formal modeling, prototyping, usability evaluation, and requirements analysis. The team collaborates in an iterative manner, starting from an initial statement from a real client and ending with the presentation of a complete design (including design rationales, working prototype that is evaluated, but also including organisational re-design and possible video scenarios