International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education

This paper presents a PC-based mini-project in power distribution system harmonics simulation for undergraduate students. The developed software may be used as a tool to assist the student in the analysis and design of a typical distribution system by taking into account the significant levels of harmonics. The paper also demonstrates the use of the harmonics filter which can identify the harmonics effect before and after the filter installation.

In this paper, a laboratory experiment on the control of power flow in parallel transmission lines is described. The computations are first performed on a digital computer as a part of the course work. When the students have gained an understanding of the control of power flows by voltage injection in one of the lines, they perform a laboratory experiment on a model transmission line.

A set of real-time control experiments applied to a non-linear system is presented. The system is an overhead crane and the experiments are applied on a low-cost scale model of it. This paper tries to compare the performance of both classical and intelligent control techniques applied to this plant.

Performing real-time multimedia transmissions through existing telecommunications infrastructures can prove to be economical. Such transmissions can be achieved by compression and decompression of multimedia information at a higher rate than that at which the information is generated. This paper describes a method of improving decompression time through distributed computing.

A senior undergraduate project in digital communication combining coding and modulation with computer simulation is described. The project consists of the study of combining coding with modulation using Reed Muller (RM) codes and the Multi Phase Shift Keying (MPSK) technique with a view to optimising on bandwidth, designing the combined trellis decoder and computer simulation of the performance of such a combined scheme in a Gaussian channel. The simulated results correlated well with the performance predicted by theory.

Theoretical analysis of the stability conditions of the negative resistance oscillator circuits in a generalized form is presented. A general approach is derived with respect to small perturbations in the operating point. Some practical examples with different circuit configurations are given.

A discrete wavelet transform based on Daubechies coefficients is used to decompose a signal into levels. The method discussed is applicable to any signal of length 2 ^N . Where the length is less than 2 ^N it is zero-padded to obtain the required length. A program written in MATLAB is used for the computations.

A lecture course in applied microprocessing supported by a laboratory delivered using commercial software and hardware had fundamental educational limitations. This paper outlines an inexpensive, flexible and open solution for teaching such microprocessor applications. Hardware, support software and an ISO C compiler are collected together and made available on the World-Wide Web.

Translated abstracts for two papers in April's issue (36/2) were inadvertently transposed:

Bandwidth behaviour of negative-feedback amplifiers with dominant-pole compensation

B. Wilson—91

A tutorial on simulation of queueing models

M. N. O. Sadiku and M. R. Tofighi—102

For corrected versions, please visit http://www.man.ac.uk/mup