Exploration of Virtual Laboratory in Power Engineering Courses

Power engineering is now experiencing a fast growth especially the high penetration of renewable energy sources. Thus, the laboratory exercises have been an important part of the engineering curricula. With the traditional laboratory education, there exists big gap to meet the demands for high requirements on hands-on skills and problem-solving abilities, which will no longer be fulfilled by using the learning through just attending lectures. In order to solve this problem, this paper will take the renewable energy teaching as an example to seek innovative methods in improving the engineering courses education quality. Browser-based multimedia-rich software tools and virtual e-learning curriculum are used since they can cover a wider audience including distant-learning students in engineering education. Computer-simulated tools such as PSIM or Simulink are widely in academy and industry to speed up the power circuit design. In order to gain practical design experiences, unique virtual laboratories will be designed to stimulate students' interest. Detailed teaching examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the teaching method by using more virtual laboratory tools.