Teaching Electrical Model of Power Transformers to Undergraduate Students: Magnetic Circuit Approach

This paper explains a unified approach for teaching the electrical model of power transformers to undergraduate students using magnetic circuits. The commonly used approach for explaining the electrical model of power transformers is a hybrid approach in which magnetic circuits are used to explain the presence of series inductances. However, the presence of shunt inductance and resistance in the model is explained using alternative approaches. In contrary, this paper explains how both series and shunt elements can be described by using magnetic circuits. Moreover, three real-world examples and Matlab/Simulink results are provided to demonstrate how the presented explanations can be used to describe the responses of power transformers in real-world applications.