Interactive Power Electronics Seminar (iPES)

Interactive Power Electronics Seminar (iPES) - www.ipes.ethz.ch

The following Java applets are part of the Introductory Course on Power Electronics taught by Prof. Kolar at the ETH Zurich. The interactive and animated applets are used as aid for teaching in the classroom and are displayed using a laptop and a beamer. Furthermore, the applets do provide an opportunity for the students to experiment and learn at home more efficiently.

Idea, content and programming:
German translation Johann W. Kolar and Uwe Drofenik
Power Electronic Systems Laboratory (PES)
ETH Zurich

Japanese translation:

Yasuyuki Nishida
Nihon University (Japan)

Korean translation:

Jaeho Choi
Chungbuk National University (South Korea)

Chinese translation:

Dehong Xu
Zhejiang University (China)

Spanish translation:

Cristina Fernandez, Pablo Zumel
Universidad Carlos III (Madrid, Spain)

French translation:

Gerard-Andre Capolino
University of Picardie-Jules Verne (France)

Dutch translation:

Jan Melkebeek
Ghent University (Belgium)

News (January 16, 2004)

Prof. Uwe Probst from the Fachhochschule Giessen-Friedberg (Germany) informed us about some errors in the Boost Converter Inductor Current Ripple -applet (wrong waveforms in the previous version). We fixed the problem. The download-version will be updated soon (after more than one year!) to include the fixed applet. If you find some strange behavior or obvious errors in applets please tell us!

We have presented iPES on a tutorial at the INTELEC'03 in Yokohama, Japan, on October 19, 2003. We demonstrated and discussed the next generation of iPES-applets that can be embedded into PowerPoint, have drawing abilities (you can draw directly into the applet with the mouse), can be resized and have zoom-in features.

A new applet is online. It is part of iPES-Thermal and describes the effect of forced convection. Actually, the pictures and calculations have been done with the CFD-program ICEPAK, and the user-interface is written in Java. While iPES-applets are typically smaller than 100kB this one is 233kB and might take longer to download on a slow network. We plan to produce more applets in that style in order to be able to explain heat transport which is essential for understanding cooling and thermal management in power electronics. Feel free to tell us how you think about this kind of educational applets.

Since iPES has proved to be useful in the classroom teaching power electronics we started to develop some applets in the iPES-style to support the basic electrical engineering course that our laboratory is providing for the students of the Mechanical and Process Engineering Department of the ETH Zurich. We will call it iPES-AET and you can find it here. At the moment there are only two applets about operational amplifier circuits but we will soon add more applets.

On the iPES-webpage you currently could find applets and user information but no text on fundamentals and theory of power electronics. We are teaching power electronics basics based on a textbook which is currently under preparation and the applets are used in addition to conventional lecture material. This textbook and the lecture material will be made available to the public in near future.

For performance problems see the Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

Find an interesting collection of free educational material related to power electronics and energy at the official homepage of the EPE Education Chapter.

Comments are welcome.

Last Change: January 16, 2004