Hello,
I’m considering using PLECS as a simulation environment to support an undergrad course in fundamental circuit analysis. PLECS is very well suited for teaching time-domain response, and of course handles DC resistive circuits nicely.
What I find harder is using it to solve phasor/AC circuits for teaching purposes. Given a simple single-frequency AC circuit where I want students to see complex power and voltage/current phasors, the most straightforward route seems to be: FFT blocks on the voltage and current measurements, a Polar-to-Cartesian conversion to extract real/imaginary components, and then some computational blocks to build complex power and split it into P and Q.
This is fine for research/development, but it’s a lot to expose to undergrads who are just learning phasor analysis. Is there a faster or more “teaching-friendly” way to get phasor and complex power readouts in PLECS?
Of course, I considered building a custom “Wattmeter” component (masked subsystem) to hand out to students, but I’m not sure that would actually be much simpler for them than seeing the FFT/conversion blocks directly (it just moves the complexity somewhere else).
Thanks to everyone.