An Open-access Virtual Electric Drive Education Research Laboratory

Laboratory works are an integral part of educating the engineering students. In some cases, in-person training on real equipment may be either limited or insufficiently effective. This may be due to difficulties in accessing the equipment, its rigidly fixed functionality, the growing demand for distance education forms, as well as safety considerations. Modern information technology means make it possible to solve these problems to a significant degree through the introduction of remote access, virtual reality, digital twins, and other technologies. The article presents an example of an open-access virtual laboratory deployed on a server. Its key feature is that it simulates transients in real time, so that a student gets the feeling of working on real equipment. In addition, each student can be given an individual set of virtual equipment for studying, tuning, or diagnostics, which would be impossible to set up in a real laboratory. The virtual lab functionality corresponds to a significant degree to the real equipment at the Laboratory of Energy Saving Electric Drives within the Department of Automated Electric Drives at the National Research University Moscow Power Engineering Institute. The new virtual laboratories have positively proven themselves not only as an effective means to conduct classes remotely, but also as an additional tool to improve the quality of in-person training, which opens new opportunities for research in addition to experiments on real benches. The access to the virtual laboratory is free of charge and is available online to everyone who wants to master the basics of electric drives: they are launched in the browser by entering the corresponding web page.