We have developed a hands-on kit for prototyping power electronics. This kit permits students to design and build power circuits capable of processing thousands of watts safely, while preserving design flexibility, i.e., avoiding “cookbook” laboratory assignments. This system exposes students to real-world operating conditions and parasitics that often define and delimit a power electronic design in industry. This hardware and the associated approach to instruction provides flexible, repeated design-and-build experiences in a single-term undergraduate class typically taken by juniors and seniors.
The study of power electronics draws upon a broad range of knowledge and often required a fair amount of experience. This suggests that laboratory instruction should be an integral component of a power electronics curriculum. However, before a single watt is delivered, the student must understand not only the operation of the converter topology but also more advanced concepts such as control theory, gate drive isolation, and layout issues. Our approach is to use a "blue box" module were these details are pre-built for convenience, but not hidden inside a "black box." Improvements to our "blue box" modules are described in this paper and include a dual-MOSFET control box with independently isolated FET devices and a high quality PWM inverter built discretely.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.