Report on the Fluor Daniel Technical Education Funding Program

Visual Displays of Simulated Electromagnetic Phenomena

June 14, 2000

 Jooyong Kim, Prof. Dean Neikirk, and Prof. Francis X. Bostick

 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX, 78712

A junior level course in basic electromagnetics and transmission lines is part of the core curriculum for all undergraduates in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). At the present time this course is taught in a standard lecture format. The course has never been a popular one because an understanding of many of the concepts taught in the course requires that the students think abstractly in three dimensional spaces, if not in four when time variations are included. Students who do not have the natural ability for this type of abstract thinking find electromagnetics to be difficult, and as a result uninteresting. This is particularly unfortunate since electromagnetics is a fundamental subject that is the basis for understanding most aspects of electrical phenomena, from wave propagation to the operation of electromechanical systems.

Learning the principles of electromagnetics can be significantly enhanced with the appropriate visual displays. There are a number of organizations, both academic and commercial, that have developed software for the display of computer simulations of such phenomena as static electric and magnetic field distributions, wave phenomena, and the propagation of current and voltage on a transmission line, etc. These are all topics taught in our core electromagnetics course.

Since the advent of world-wide web many electromagnetics researchers have made a wide range of simulations available via the web. During the Spring 2000 semester we have made use of our Fluor Daniel funding to support a graduate student who has extensively reviewed the available material on the web. Below is a summary of links to both on and off campus sites where simulations are available. This information is posted at a UT-Austin wed site (http://weewave.mer.utexas.edu/DPN_files/courses/E_M_Tline_rsrcs/fluor_daniel_rprt.htm), that will then be made available to our electromagnetics instructors and students. In this way each faculty member teaching the course can incorporate these supplementary materials into his/her lectures as they see fit. As a follow-up on the success of the project, the instructors will be asked to evaluate the efficacy of the presentations on student performance.

WEB SITES WITH DESCRIPTION

CALCULATORS

SPECTRAL ANIMATIONS 

RECOMMENDED SITES