A Multimedia Introductory Course in Electric Energy; Michigan Tech University

NSF/EPRI Workshop on Innovations in Power Engineering Education

30 Oct - 1 Nov, 1997

A Multimedia Introductory Course in Electric Energy

Michigan Technological University

L.J. Bohmann, B.A. Mork, N.N. Schulz, D.O. Wiitanen

INTRODUCTION

We are going to create an introductory course in electric energy that is multimedia based and aimed at sophomore and junior college students. We plan to develop a course that looks at all aspects of electric energy production, transmission and distribution, and utilization. The course will introduce technical concepts as well as explain business, economic, regulatory, environmental, and historical issues. We will attempt to give the students the big picture, how electric energy affects their lives and the world around them. The idea is to create a course which all electrical engineers will find relevant, and thus electrical engineering departments throughout the country can be justified in using all or part of the material we develop for a required course in electric energy. At the same time, the course will form a firm foundation, and a broad perspective, for students interested in further study of electrical energy engineering.

Over the past 20 years, many universities have dropped required courses in electric power and energy conversion. [1,2] This is due to two factors: the increase in the amount of material within electrical engineering, and the perception that electric power is a mature, static field. With the increase in material, there is pressure to continually reevaluate the curriculum and drop topics that are less relevant. The electric power field is perceived as a traditional, slow-moving field, with a diminished importance in the minds of many electrical engineers.

In reality, the electric power industry has been going through many advances and is becoming increasingly interconnected to all aspects of electrical engineering. Power electronics, power quality, and deregulation of the power industry are just some of the developments that should be of concern to more than just power engineers. As an example, look at power electronics. It has been estimated that by the year 2000 50% of the electricity used will pass through a power electronic device. [3] What are the input and output characteristics of these devices? If you are going to design a product with a power supply in it, you should have some idea. The control of motors has become increasingly easier as their power electronic controllers have become more complex and sophisticated. This has changed the way many processes are controlled. There are many other examples of how power electronics affects all of electrical engineering.

Our course will address these changes and highlight the importance of power engineering within electrical engineering. By addressing state-of-the-art topics that affect all electrical engineers and by delivering them in a multimedia environment, it will be easier to excite students about the power engineering field. By concentrating on an introductory course, one which many universities will require their students to take, we will be able to draw more students to the field and raise awareness of the issues facing the power industry among all electrical engineers.

More so than any other area of electrical engineering, the electric energy sector is multidisciplinary. In developing this course, we can use this to strengthen the concept that electrical engineering is not an isolated field and it is greatly affected by the world at large. We can easily introduce mechanical engineering, environmental engineering, chemistry, business and public policy concepts. We can also use this course to demonstrate that power engineering is the synthesis of many subspecialties within electrical engineering. Power engineering makes use of electromagnetics, automatic controls, communications, computer applications, and signal processing.

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

The project team consists of faculty from Michigan Tech University; four from the Electrical Engineering Department, two from the School of Business, and one each from the Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Social Sciences Departments. They are:

  • Dr. Leonard Bohmann, P.E., Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.
  • Dr. Bruce Mork, P.E., Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering.
  • Dr. Noel Schulz, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering.
  • Dr. Dennis Wiitanen, P.E., Professor of Electrical Engineering.
  • Dr. Paul Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics and Engineering Management.
  • Dr. Mark Roberts, Associate Professor of Mineral Economics.
  • Dr. Peck Cho, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering.
  • Dr. Stanley Vitton, P.E., Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
  • Dr. Barry Solomon, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Policy.

The work of putting together the course will be handled primarily by the four faculty from the Electrical Engineering Department with the help of graduate students. Faculty from the other departments will help with the content from their specialties.

We have formed an advisory committee made up of representatives from a wide spectrum of the electric power industry to guide the project. The members are:

  • Don Autio, Project Manager, M&E Systems, Dow Corning Co., retired.
  • Michael P. Bahrman, Manager, System Studies, ABB Power T&D Co. Inc.
  • Ken Behrendt, Regional Application Engineer, Schweitzer Engineering Labs. Inc.
  • Stephen J. Beuning, Director, Power Marketing, Cenerprise, Inc.
  • Douglas E. Criner, Vice President, Burns and McDonnell.
  • Bob Hasibar, Electrical Engineer, Technical Services, Bonneville Power Administration.
  • Kalyan Mustaphi, Consulting Engineer, Northern States Power Co.
  • Paul R. Nicastri, Advanced Component Engineering Manager, Ford Motor Co.
  • Rebecca Nold, Power Generation Engineering, General Electric Co.
  • Mike Wischow, Project Engineer, Detroit Edison Co.

This is a diverse group. They represent industries from traditional utilities to power marketers, from electrical equipment manufacturers to consulting companies and end-use industries. All the members are electrical engineers with varying years of experience, ranging from 10 to over 30, and with many different levels of responsibility. They are able to give us a wide perspective of what electrical engineering graduates should know about energy systems and equipment.

We held a day and a half workshop in early August to bring together the industrial advisors and the project team. Prior to this, we collected material and distributed it to the participants so that everyone could review it and know the issues involved in developing a new course in electric energy. The material included discussions of problems and solutions within electrical engineering education [4,5], as well as with power engineering education [6-9]. In addition, there were papers discussing innovative use of computers in power engineering education. [10-12]

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

The goal of the workshop was to define the scope, content, and delivery methods of the new course. Although much of this was done, there is still a lot left to do. The format of the workshop was to hold hour and a half long focus groups consisting of a mix of professionals and educators to discuss various aspects of the project. All the groups were then brought together to summarize the outcomes.

We all agreed that the course material should be made exciting and interesting to the student, emphasizing high tech developments. The presentation of the materials to the students should take advantage of present computer hardware and software capabilities. We will package the material on a CD-ROM, allowing the seamless integration of text, photos, videos, computer simulations, and computer animations. We discussed a couple of specific programs we could use to create the multimedia material, but decided that that decision was best made as late as possible in order to take advantage of any advances in technology.

The course should stress the 'system' aspect of energy devices, that each part is interrelated with the others and decisions about one will effect the others. To aid in presenting this concept, it was suggested that navigation through the material could make use of graphical hyperlinks to zoom in for more details and zoom out to get the complete picture. For example, the main entry page could be a graphical view of a power system, from generation to end-use. By repeatedly clicking a mouse on the generation area and zooming in, more and more details would be revealed about the different types of generation, the interconnection issues, the economics, the environmental impact, and the regulations associated with generation alternative. By zooming out, the effects of the different types of generation on the system as a whole could be explored.

The interdisciplinary nature of power engineering will be stressed. For example, the topic of energy sources will show this. A thermal power plant deals with thermodynamics. Both steam and wind turbines are analyzed using traditional mechanical engineering methods. Fuel cells involve electrochemistry. Each type of energy source has its own environmental concerns. Solutions to these concerns are the realm of environmental engineering and the laws and regulations governing them bring up public policy issues.

Multimedia tools will be used to effectively demonstrate concepts. Again, using energy sources as an example, a generator can be animated to show revolving magnetic fields along with the associated voltages and currents. The same type of animation can be used to show the change in torque angle of a synchronous generator as the load changes.

The course will make use of "interest hooks" to connect students to "power" in their lives through surprising examples. An example would be a laptop computer with a battery, a power distribution system, disk drive motors, and power electronics. The basic structure of each topic would be:

Specific Example

More visuals

Explanation

Equations

with hyperlinks to other topics where appropriate. The members of the industrial advisory board will provide many of the examples, as well as visuals (photos, images, and video clips) and other related resources.

The focus groups gave detailed suggestions on how best to cover some of the topics: History, Energy Sources, Power Delivery, System Operation, and End Use. These will be used as templates to develop the other topics as well. We also developed an extensive list of ideas on how to incorporate multimedia elements. The list included items which were best illustrated visually, examples of well-written courseware, and suggestions (and offers) of material.

Just as important as what is taught is how the material is taught. We will make extensive use of group projects to build teamwork skills. We will work on novel ways to develop oral presentation skills, such as the use of poster presentations [13],and to integrate professional skills into the classroom. [14,15] Homework problems will be structured in such a way that the numerical solutions would need to be explained, giving the students practice in technical writing. We will make extensive use of computer math packages that many students are now learning in their calculus sequence. [16] The graphing capabilities will allow the students to quickly visualize the results and to explore how varying the input data changes the output. The computer programs included in the material will be designed with graphical outputs; again helping the students visualize the results and building conceptual understanding.

The final product will be a course that is exciting to the students, easy to implement by the instructors, and with wide enough appeal so that it is widely implemented. We welcome your thoughts and comments on how we can best achieve these goals.

References

[1]IEEE Power Engineering Society Committee Report; "Electric Power Engineering Education Resources 1993-94"; 96 WM 057-0 PWRS.

[2]IEEE Power Engineering Society Committee Report; "Electric Power Engineering Education Resources 1973-74"; IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems; Vol. PAS-95, No. 4, pp. 1194-1201, July-August, 1976.

[3]N. Mohan, T.M. Undeland, W.P. Robbins; Power Electronics: Converters, Applications, and Design, 2nd ed.; John Wiley and Sons, 1995; p. 3.

[4]L. Geppert; "Educating the Renaissance Engineer"; IEEE Spectrum, September, 1995. pp. 39-43.

[5]C.G. Masi; "Re-Engineering Engineering Education"; IEEE Spectrum, September, 1995; pp. 44-47.

[6]B.L. Capehart and L.C. Capehart; "A Proposal for Broadening the Education of Power System Engineers"; IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. E-24, No. 3, August 1981; pp. 217- 221.

[7]The Power Engineering Curricula Subcommittee, C.A. Gross, Chair; "Electric Power Engineering Curricula Content in the 21st Century", IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 9, No. 3, August 1994; pp. 1145 - 1151.

[8]L.J. Bohmann, B.A. Mork, and N.N. Schulz; "Redefining the Introductory Electrical Energy Conversion Course"; 1997 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June, 1997, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Session 2333.

[9]H.L. Hess; "Power Electronics Instruction: Topics, Curricula, and Trends; 1997 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June, 1997, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Session 3233.

[10]P. Jayanetti, J. Olcott, J. Johnson, and J. Patton; "A Java-based Authoring Tool for developing Power System Labware"; 1997 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June, 1997, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Session 2533.

[11]B. Fardanesh; "Computer Aided Instruction of Rotating Electric Machines via Animated Graphics"; IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 7, No. 4, November, 1992; pp. 1579-83.

[12]D.L. Lubkeman and E. R. Collins; "Hypermedia-Based Courseware Development for Power Engineering Education"; IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 6, No. 3, August 1991; pp. 1259-1265.

[13]N.N. Schulz and L.J. Bohmann; "Using Poster Presentations to Improve Students Verbal Presentation Skills"; Proceedings of the 58th Annual ASEE North Midwest Section Meeting; Fargo, ND; Oct. 1996; pp. IV.C-4.1 through 4.5.

[14]B.A. Mork and L.J. Bohmann; "Preparing Students for the Professional Engineering Design Environment"; Proceedings of the 56th Annual ASEE North Midwest Section Meeting; Duluth, MN; Oct. 1994.

[15]B.A. Mork and D.O. Wiitenan; "Integration of Professional Skills into the Design Curriculum"; Proceedings of the 58th Annual ASEE North Midwest Section Meeting; Fargo, ND; Oct. 1996; in press.

[16]A.C. Tucker and J.R.C. Leitzel, eds.; Assessing Calculus Reform Efforts, A Report to the Community; The Mathematical Association of America, 1995.

Multi leveled; hiarchical structutre, with many links

keep 'system' prespective, real world, relavance

cover all aspects; technical; regulatory; economics; environmental; historical; etc., etc

What do we do, include car as example?

include 1line diagrams, examples outside utility industry, work in groups (projects), oral written communication

use quantities (example: hairdryer uses all elec energy in car)

power electronic conversion

1