Teaching electric machinery and associated electromagnetic fields-a case for the benefits of academic computing

Three broad categories of benefits resulting from use of and access to personal computers (PCs) and workstations (WSs) in teaching electric machines and drives, including all the electromagnetic field aspects associated with such electromechanical energy conversion devices are described. The first category concerns benefits from using computer graphics in computational electromagnetics. The second category involves quantification of electric machinery parameters and performance characteristics from computational electromagnetics. The third category concerns benefits from using computer simulation to study power-electronically-controlled electric drives, using time-domain models in which all significant effects of both time and space harmonics are retained. The material discussed is taught at Clarkson University at the senior undergraduate and first-year graduate levels.>