Hardware laboratories for power electronics and motor drives distance learning courses

This paper describes the new Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based power electronics and drives laboratories used for graduate teaching and research at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). Since the hardware is controllable through an FPGA based controller via a personal computer (PC), the laboratory experimental set up can be accessed by students located outside NPS through the internet. These new remotely controlled, real time, power laboratories are among the first experiments of this kind in the United States and they have been greeted by the power-track students with enthusiasm.