2/11/2025 Eleanor Wyllie 4 min read
Written by Eleanor Wyllie
The IEEE PELS effort will provide versatile experimentation kits to resource-constrained institutions.
With support from the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS), Arijit Banerjee has been leading an effort to design and create affordable, hands-on experimentation kits for college-level power electronics courses. The beta-version kits are already a hit with his U. of I. students, but Banerjee and his collaborators have ambitious plans that go far beyond the campus level: the kits are intended to be replicated and shared with resource-constrained educational institutions around the globe.
Watch a video of Banerjee demonstrating a sample of an experiment using the kit.
“These kits are designed to enhance students’ understanding by allowing them to directly apply theoretical concepts in a lab setting,” Banerjee said. “By engaging in guided experiments, students gain practical skills and experience that help bridge the gap between theory and application.”
Banerjee, who is an associate professor of electrical & computer engineering and mechanical science & engineering, explained that a couple of years ago, IEEE PELS started looking for a way to produce and distribute inexpensive college-level power engineering kits. They reviewed kits already being used at various universities, and over all other options, they chose as their starting point the U. of I.’s kit, which was being developed for students to use remotely during the early months of COVID.
“Some of the other universities that IEEE PELS looked at had excellent kits, no doubt about it,” Banerjee said. “But they were relatively costly.”
The Illinois design was cheaper because the kits had been developed to be affordable, single-use consumables. Students work with them throughout the ECE 469 course, “Power Electronics Laboratory”: they start with a fresh board and build on it through various projects, and get to keep the completed piece at the end of the semester. The low price, without any compromise in the learning quality, was a key factor for the IEEE PELS; their goal is to provide high-quality experimentation tools to students at under-resourced universities that may not have state-of-the-art facilities, or may have no lab facilities at all.
Still, you might wonder: how can the kits be inexpensive—the estimated cost of the basic block is just $100 to $150 each—while also being good enough for coursework at a world-class engineering school like the U. of I.?
The answer is that Banerjee’s team has treated flexibility as a top-level goal. He says, “What we are trying to do is to make this kit so flexible that with a small kit itself, you can do 10 to 12 experiments easily... You can do multiple things just by changing some buttons and jumpers. You can adapt it for different setups. So that way, we are not compromising on the quality of parts being used; but at the same time, we are not unnecessarily adding parts.”
Banerjee expressed gratitude to “the many graduate students, undergraduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who contributed to developing these kits, as well as the IEEE PELS University Kits Committee, whose members are from different universities and industry.” In particular, his Fall 2024 ECE 469 students worked with the enhanced kit developed for IEEE PELS; they served, in effect, as beta testers, and provided valuable feedback.
Banerjee also singled out Dr. Ulaş C. Coşkun, a research engineer at the Grainger Center for Electric Machinery and Electromechanics (CEME), for his significant contributions to the effort.
Banerjee reflected that this project has exemplified his experience of research and teaching as deeply integrated phenomena. “As researchers and as educators, we ultimately have only one brain,” he laughed. “Whatever I am doing on the kit, it trickles down to my research—and whatever I do in my research, it trickles down into this educational kit!” He added that he is always challenging himself to think of new ways to “keep people excited about power electronics.”
Dr. Katherine Kim, the 2024-2025 IEEE PELS Vice President of Global Relations, stated that PELS is “in strong support” of the university kit project.
“These kits cover a wide range of power converter topics and are part of an ongoing, collaborative process with educators and students around the world,” she said. “By gathering feedback and making improvements along the way, the goal is that the kits will be versatile enough to let users create on their own after learning the basics. This effort really captures what IEEE PELS’s educational goals are all about—expanding access to education and helping prepare the next generation of engineers to lead the way in power electronics.”