Resumen de WWEM: A new educational software package based on MATLAB for optimal designing of wire winding of electrical machines to undergraduate students
Gholamreza Shafipour, Abdolvahhab Fetanat
Although several researchers have studied the use of educational software in electrical machine courses, the lack of educationalsoftware to design wire winding of electrical machines is felt. It has been continually the concern to create an educational softwarepackage to help both the students and lecturers to design wire winding diagrams easily because the process of design by hand isdifficult.This paper introduces an interactive software package created by the authors, named WWEM (Wire Winding of ElectricalMachines), to assist students to grasp various wire winding models and their design principles. In addition, it tries to facilitate theprocess of designing diagrams in order to improve students’ learning and at the same time lecturers’ teaching. WWEM consists ofvarious wire winding models of electrical machines, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)—a swarm intelligence technique—andMATLAB programming. WWEM gives optimal design of wire winding using PSO. The present study was performed onundergraduate students attending the course ‘wire winding of electrical machines’. A statistical hypothesis test on student marks inthe final exam showed that the majority of the students who had employed WWEM got the highest marks; they had became morecompetent in the area of wire winding. Based on this, the authors suggest that the use of WWEM will help lecturers to identify thestudents’ level of understanding so that they can explain better the concepts of wire winding. WWEM is capable of being includedin MATLAB Power System Toolbox (SimPowerSystems) as one the characteristics of electrical machines and used on the Web, aswell.
