THE USE OF FINITE ELEMENT ELECTROMAGNETICS PACKAGES IN UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

CAD methods and purpose‐designed software packages are now widely used in engineering practice and it is important to introduce students of undergraduate courses to these in preparation for their future employment in this environment. In the areas of electronic circuit design and analysis this has already been done successfully using such packages as ORCAD and SPICE and a similar situation exists in simulation with MATLAB and ACSL, all of which are now used extensively in university courses. However, with a few notable exceptions, less progress has been made with finite element electromagnetics packages even though this subject area benefits greatly from the use of these. Experience shows that many students find such packages somewhat uninspiring and are only convinced of their value when they have seen them applied to problems involving real hardware. Accordingly, the approach described in this paper incorporates the use of a modern professional package into a suite of three laboratory experiments, so allowing comparisons to be made between computed, calculated and measured quantities. A further problem, that of the long time required to learn the operating system for such packages, which usually greatly exceeds the three hours or so generally allotted to such activities, is eased by providing pre‐compiled programme segments for the major procedures. By this means, while still proceeding through all the stages necessary in solving a real problem, students avoid the most time consuming and routine parts of these and so are able to progress quickly to a solution. This technique is described in some detail in a previous paper.