ECE Electric Drives Laboratory
Overview
The Electric
Drives Laboratory is a state-of-the-art teaching/research laboratory for Electric Drives and Renewable Energy.
This laboratory
is utilized to deliver hands-on experiments and projects in electric machines, circuits,
power electronics, electric drives, power system and renewable energy. The
students become proficient in the use of industry-standard tools such as MATLAB/SIMULINK for electric drives
simulation and Opal-RT for real-time hardware-in-the-loop digital control.
Faraday Laboratory
workstation
There are six
Faraday standard laboratory workstations with each comprising laboratory
equipment such as function generators, oscilloscopes, frequency counter, high
performance DC power supplies, three-phase autotransformers, power electronics
converters, isolators, power meters, and multiple combinations of switches and
different types of electrical loads. A typical workbench setup is shown in the
following figures.
Opal-RT real-time
hardware-in-the-loop electric drives digital control workstation
There are six Opal-RT real-time electric drives digital
control workstations with each comprising state-of-the-art equipment including
RT-LAB power electronics power processing unit, AC/DC electrical motors and
generators, digital encoder for speed measurement, current/voltage sensor
boards, FPGA card within Linux system, and latest version of MATLAB/SIMULINK and Opal-RT.
Renewable energy
workstation
The
electric drives laboratory is also equipped with wind turbine generator and
solar panel stations. A lab-size stand-alone electrical power system with
distributed power with both traditional and renewable energy resources can be
set up in the lab. Students can gain hands-on experience with renewable energy through
specially designed instructional experiments. Advanced research projects can be
carried out to emulate a real electrical power system and to predict dynamic
behavior of the electrical power systems with high penetration of renewable
energy resources.
