Using Specific or General Software Tools in Power Engineering Education

Abstract In present there are a lot of software tools that can be used in Power Engineering laboratories in order to teach a large variety of phenomena. Some of them are dedicated for specific applications like simulation of transient phenomena of electromagnetic and some of them are general purpose tools for modeling and simulating dynamic systems. Technical literature presents a lot of comparison between such tools but the results are presented only from the perspective of research criteria. The scope of this paper is to present how to choose the right tool to be used in a specific laboratory, in order of a better understanding of the phenomena regarding a specific application of power system field. The paper presents a study case of a power system having two high voltage levels, modeled using two different tools: ATP-EMTP – dedicated software and MatLab Simulink – a general analyzing tool. The comparison is done for a power quality study.