Abstract— The objective of this paper is to develop a basic virtual laboratory in Power System on the topic: “Simulation of voltage drops on Power Transmission Lines”. This comes as a result of the inability of many tertiary institutions to provide adequate laboratory facilities to their students in technical fields like Power System. Virtual laboratory is a major approach in solving this problem as it provides more flexibility and almost the same quality of teaching and learning while keeping the implementation cost very low. The virtual laboratory developed in this article was done with Matlab/SimPowerSystem. A model of a real power transmission line was described and the setting of simulation components was also clearly shown. Normally encountered instruments in Real Power Laboratory including Oscilloscope, Wattmeter, Frequency Analyzer and others were also manipulated in the simulation approach. Results were displayed in term of graphs/tables and were also compared to real life scenario in order to measure the quality of education afforded. Also a cost analysis was added at the end to emphasize on the reduction of cost brought by the simulation approach. This study confirms the advantages of virtual laboratory in Power System and therefore encourages most of tertiary institutions to adopt it in order to improve on their quality of teaching.

Index Terms— Matlab simulation, power system, virtual laboratory, implementation cost & quality of education.

Amevi Acakpovi is with the Department of Electrical/Electronic, Accra Polytechnic, Accra, Ghana (e-mail: acakpovia@gmail.com).
Olufemi O. Fatonade is with the Department of Building Technology, Accra Polytechnic, Accra, Ghana (e-mail: femodfat@yahoo.com).
Ahmed Gedel is with the Department of Science Laboratory Technology, Accra Polytechnic, Accra, Ghana (e-mail: ahmedgedel@yahoo.com).

Cite: Amevi Acakpovi, Olufemi O. Fatonade, and Ahmed Gedel, " Improving the Teaching/Learning of Power System with the Approach of Virtual Laboratory," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 142-145, 2014.