Adoption of Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP) on a Personal Computer

As a result of improved performance and decreasing costs of microcomputers, they are considered as effective tools for classroom instruction. In fact, the rapid proliferation of microprocessors has presented the engineering educators with a number of difficult questions. How can classroom presentations be kept abreast of the rapidly changing technology? How far can we use readily available software for classroom instruction? What is the share of mainframe, and microcomputer usage for instruction? With this trend, new computer aided courses are introduced in several Universities, with the following goals. a) Microcomputer based instrumentation, and b) Software aided design and analysis. Microprocessor based instrumentation is the key to achieve accuracy, and repeatability. Software based analyses are carried out in spreadsheeting, equation solving, and graphics. The standard software packages are useful for engineers who are working in different disciplines. In the narrow specializations such software packages are not readily available, and developments are not likely to occur in the near future, since the demand is not very high. In such areas there is a need to adopt existing software packages from the mainframe. Power system is such a narrow specialization, and the Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP) is a widely used software package for classroom instruction on mainframe computers. In this paper, the performance of EMTP on a microcomputer is studied. Computer-aided analysis has proven to be a viable tool in understanding transients in power systems.