Virtual Labs: an Effective Engineering Education Tool for Remote Learning and not only

Abstract

operating real hardware is a fundamental engineering skill. For this reason, hands-on classes involving real equipment is an essential tool in engineering education. At the same time in many cases there are certain limitations related to in-person training of students: hardware availability, hardly modifiable functionality for each student and educational goal, the increased demand on remote learning and safety aspects. Modern information technologies enable various means for partially solving the mentioned issues by providing remote access, VR-technologies, digital twins, etc. The paper provides a brief overview of aspects related to introducing virtual labs into educational process, with the main focus on the requirement for the virtual hardware, such as an electric power drive system, should replicate processes with time resolution in order of several milliseconds. And the interaction of the equipment with the student should be done in a way there is a feeling of a real object, necessitating low response time in order of hundreds of milliseconds. This requires high priority of computational power allocation for mathematical model calculation as well as high communication channel bandwidth between the computation power source and the user interface. The paper presents an example of such a server deployed virtual laboratory. The functionality was inspired by that of real equipment installed at Energy saving electric power drive laboratory at the Department of Electric Drives of Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Apart from substantively replicating the functionality and feel of high-dynamic hardware real-time operation, it enables to provide each student with an individual virtual equipment set to be explored, tuned or diagnosed. Virtual labs of the kind proved to be an effective engineering education tool for remote learning, giving new opportunities in improving the in-person training process as well.