EEE Tree: A Journey of Courses

Electrical & Electronic Engineering, being one of the most versatile fields in engineering, attracts many juveniles each year to choose it as their career. Surprisingly not all end up as an engineer although they go through the same courses and fight for a piece of paper to define himself as an engineer!

No Time for Realization?
What is the difference between an electrical engineer and an electrician? Have you ever come across this question or have wondered about it, seeing an electrician work? Many of you may have. The answer is pretty simple when google is around. But let's halt for a moment and think whether we can answer this question based on the engineering courses we have learned so or should I say, we have 'Passed'?

Precisely speaking, we go through about 40-50 courses in BSc but if we try to recall, we may see that most of us never realized what is the motive of learning a specific course. At least once in tour life you have wondered why you are learning this Math, Mechanical or Civil course in EEE. Applications of a course is not confined to a specific sector. Rather they are vastly distributed and interrelated with each other. Let's try to have a look at the basic applications of the core courses of EEE.

Basic blocks of EEE

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Generation of Electrical Power
Following the chronological order, we need to generate electrical power first, but how?

Mechanical courses describe the process of generating

electrical power from natural resources. To be precise, mechanical

devices converts the natural energies to electrical energies

In addition, a mechanical drawing course is offered to give basic ideas about engineering drawing of objects and shapes from different angles and views. Again, we find two fundamental Energy Conversion courses where in the first part, Energy Conversion I, DC machines (Motors, Generators) and the transformer operations are introduced. And Energy Conversion II, the latter one, is concerned about AC machinery fundamentals.

Now why should we concern about machines? There are mechanical engineers for that purpose. But as an EEE engineer working in a generating station, one must need to know these things to operate the electrical system in accordance with the unpredictable situations.

Transmission of Electrical Power

The next approach to reach consumer is to transmit the generated power from a very long distance. Two core courses Power System I & Power System II are offered to give a basic idea to understand the structure of a typical power system.

The designing of a transmission system including the selection of cables, towers, sag, system protection, fault analysis and high voltage occurrences like line inductance, capacitance, corona etc. are the selected topics. Necessary computational techniques (per unit, phasor) are taught to analyze a system.

Distribution & Supply

Substations serve the purpose of receiving the transmitted power and distribute it through the networks. An engineer must be well aware of the maintenance, operating system and protection of the substation consisting of transformers, switches, relays, current transformers, isolator, control desk, fuse, circuit breaker etc. 

Again a designer has to design the distribution network as per the requirement of the area for efficient distribution of electric power.

To provide these concepts with necessary computational and designing problems, Power Electronics, Switchgear & Protection, Power system and Energy Conversion courses are offered.

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Fundamentals

Coming to the very first and fundamental course, we find Electrical Circuit I that initiates the journey of EEE. With Electrical Circuit II, these two courses provide the circuit laws & theorems, properties of electrical elements, circuit behavior and responses under different excitations. These give the basic of circuit designing, fault analysis, AC & DC transients and filter designing.
Again, magnetic circuits for relays & electromagnetics and coupling circuits for transformers are introduced.
The prior motive of these courses are to develop the ability of electrical system designing and system fault analysis. Two other basic courses in this regard are, Civil Engineering Drawing and Electrical Services Design.

Civil drawing introduces the infrastructural design of houses and

buildings with different engineering notations and design rules.

Electrical Services Design teaches the installation of electrical system in

the infrastructure with relevant domestic & industrial system installations.

It was in the nineteenth century when EEE witnessed the technological advancement. Revolutionary communication hacks and the invention of integrated circuit technology resulted into two major branches of EEE; Communication and Electronics.

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Engineering Physics & Solid State Devices

Generally two physics courses are offered to the EEE students on the following topics;

· Atomic Structure of materials

· Electronic Structure of materials

· Waves & Oscillations with mechanics

· Electrostatics & Magnetism

· Modern Physics

· Optics

To many of us, these physics courses are the most painful courses with numerous awful derivations and equations. Still the courses are very much important to understand the material properties that lead to some sophisticated sectors like VLSI, Photonics, Optoelectronics and Embedded systems.

Why This Course!

The next course in this queue is the Solid State Devices or Semiconductor Physics, the very course we mostly want to 'Pass'rather than to learn and try to find the answer why we are learning these things! However this course is the continuation of the electronic structure of materials (semiconductor) that includes the inherent properties like conductivity, resistivity, optical properties, temperature dependence and operating principles of semiconductor devices based on the Schrodinger's Wave Equation. This is course is the introduction to the high level integration technology, embedded system, chip designing and fabrication etc.

The prime motive of this course is to develop mathematical

models of the physical phenomena taking place at the electronic level

of materials. It describes the physical properties in terms of equations

used in Electronics I

Electronics

The primary goal of Electronics I is to get yourself acquainted with the basic semiconductor devices' (Diode, BJT, FET) structures and their operating principles. Though the advanced technologies use FPGA, MOSFET, CMOS, the fundamental principle is almost same. Electronics I provides the necessary analysis techniques and equivalent circuit models.

Electronics II is about analog electronic devices (Operational Amplifiers), circuitry and operations. Discussions on filter designing, frequency responses and classes of power amplifiers provide the basic ideas on the analog integration and system analysis.

Unlike Electronics I & Electronics II, Digital Electronics or Digital Logic Design (DLD) deals with the principles of latest integrated devices (Digital devices). Enhancing the ability to understand and to develop the digital circuit blocks with SSI & MSI is the prime motive of this course. Semester projects like building a specific base calculator gives practical understanding of this course. 

Communication

Communication I briefly discusses about the sequential development of communication methods and different technologies while Communication II talks about signal characteristics and occurrences. These two compact courses give the basics of further applications like optical, microwave, cellular and wireless communication.

Signals

There are some courses to discuss the properties and behavior of signals which are electromagnetic waves in most cases. Electromagnetic Fields & Waves provides the basic knowledge about electrostatics, magnetostatics and wave propagation.

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Signals & Systems, these two courses discuss various kinds of signals and their analysis techniques both in time and frequency domain in details. These two courses lead to the advanced signaling applications.

Interdisciplinary: Why Programming?

Though programming is centered to CSE, it has drawn significant attention in EEE also. That's why a significant sector, Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) has arisen. And sometimes EEE students are found to be programming freaks. Following that, basic programming courses are offered so that students can have a handy experience on C, C++,

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Python, Assembly and MATLAB programming. These programming languages are very much crucial to PID, Micro-controller based system, development boards (Arduino, Raspberry Pi) and design related projects and courses.

Miscellaneous

There are always fundamental mathematics courses to provide sufficient knowledge on basic analytic techniques like Differential Calculus, Integral Calculus, Matrices, Vectors, Linear Algebra, Laplace Transformation etc. to analyze and solve different problems in engineering.

Math courses are crucial to engineering as engineering is an

applicative subject, not theoretical. Mathematics has become the 

language of engineering that one must know.

Again there are number of optional courses to provide detailed and advanced discussions on a particular topic. And the engineering courses with corresponding practical courses and simulation software skills add a compact concept to the journey of EEE.