Animation Software For The Teaching Of Electrical Transmission Lines
- Conference
- Location
-
Chicago, Illinois
- Publication Date
-
June 18, 2006
- Start Date
-
June 18, 2006
- End Date
-
June 21, 2006
- ISSN
-
2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
-
Computers in Education
- Page Count
-
12
- Page Numbers
-
11.217.1 - 11.217.12
- DOI
-
10.18260/1-2--116
- Permanent URL
-
https://peer.asee.org/116
- Download Count
-
1026
Paper Authors
Raymond Jacquot University of Wyoming
Ray Jacquot received his BSME and MSEE degrees at the University of Wyoming in 1960 and 1962 respectively. He was an NSF Science Faculty Fellow at Purdue University where he received the Ph.D. in 1969. He is a member of ASEE, IEEE and ASME and has been active in ASEE for over three decades serving as Rocky Mountain Section Chair and PIC IV Chair. His professional interests are in modeling, control and simulation of dynamic systems. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering. E-mail: quot@uwyo.edu.
Cameron Wright
University of Wyoming
orcid.org/0000-0002-6029-1896
Cameron H. G. Wright, Ph.D, P.E., is on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY. He was previously Professor and Deputy Department Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at the U.S. Air Force Academy. His research interests include signal and image processing, biomedical instrumentation, communications systems, and laser/electro-optics applications.
Dr. Wright is a member of ASEE, IEEE, SPIE, NSPE, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. E-mail: c.h.g.wright@ieee.org.
Robert Kubichek University of Wyoming
Robert F. Kubichek received his Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming in 1985. He has worked in research positions at the BDM Corporation and the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (U.S. Dept. of Commerce), and was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado from 1989-1991. He joined the University of Wyoming in 1991, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Current research interests include speech analysis for intelligibility and speech quality, and developing new diagnostic tools for speech disorders. E-mail: kubichek@uwyo.edu.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
Animation Software for the Teaching of Electrical Transmission Lines
Introduction
Electrical transmission lines are conduits for the transport of both information and electrical energy. As such, they are an important subject for undergraduate students in electrical engineering to master. With pressure to include more topics in the curriculum, most electrical and computer engineering curricula have limited the required coverage of electromagnetics to a single three or four semester hour course. With this development, the allotted space in the single course must be used wisely and many topics formerly covered in a multi-course sequence must be omitted. This forces some difficult curricular decisions as some pet topics of various faculty cannot be covered in the allotted time. At many institutions, the topic of transmission lines was in itself a separate course which has long ago been deleted from the required curriculum. With new emphasis on communication systems and integrated circuits, the topic of transmission lines is more important than ever, although the context has changed. In many cases, the topic of transmission lines has become part of the remaining required electromagnetics course.1 Usually this coverage is limited to sinusoidally driven lossless lines and propagation of suddenly applied D.C. signals on lossless lines.
Since transmission lines are distributed parameter systems, it is difficult to visualize the voltage and current on the line from analytical solutions. Many of our students are graphical learners and thus computer graphics may provide enhanced student learning. The authors have developed MATLAB-based animation software to handle the following cases:
• sinusoidally driven lossy lines (both resistance and conductance are present), • sinusoidally driven lossless lines (no series resistance or shunt conductance), • propagation of suddenly applied d.c signals on a lossless line, and • propagation of a rectangular pulse on a lossless line.
The software discussed here may employed for educational purposes in two distinct ways. The first is use by the instructor in the classroom to illustrate the concepts as they are discussed. The second is use by students in the computer lab to solve problems assigned by the instructor. This may require careful design of problem sets by the instructor to ensure that some hand calculations are required. A typical problem for the application of the lossless transmission line simulator is given in Appendix A. The software is not intended as a substitute for the understanding gained early in the process by solution of problems using a hand calculator. The concepts of load and source impedance matching, wave reflection, and standing wave ratio can be explored experimentally by students in the setting of the computer keyboard.
The concept of using MATLAB for the animation of lumped parameter dynamic systems was demonstrated by Watkins et al.2 Recently there have been a number of papers describing the graphical interpretation of partial differential equations. The transport of pollutants in groundwater has been described using web-based graphics3 and another paper reports a virtual laboratory for teaching quasistationary electromagnetics.4 Another recent paper discusses the solution of groundwater problems using a spreadsheet.5 Still another paper employs a
Jacquot, R., & Wright, C., & Kubichek, R. (2006, June), Animation Software For The Teaching Of Electrical Transmission Lines Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--116
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2006 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015