Evaluation and continuous improvement of magnetic components material design skills in interdisciplinary switched-mode power supply

Abstract

The design of switched-mode power supplies (SMPSs) is a material-electrical engineering interdisciplinary problem. The design of magnetic component materials can significantly affect SMPSs’ performances. In engineering education, the design and development of solutions is an important skill for engineering students. However, the traditional engineering experiments curriculum is shown as validation and single-disciplinary experiments as well as one-sided assessment results. To foster open-ended exploration, enhance students’ material design skills, and improve skills adaptation, students must tackle real engineering problems and develop practical design solutions. This paper proposes an exploratory factor analysis and knowledge graph-based method for evaluating and continuously improving magnetic components material design skills in the context of SMPS design tasks. First, we used the multiple imputation method to address the missing data. Each imputed data was analyzed to extract factors through parallel analysis, ordinary least squares estimation, and target rotation. Then, we identified four sub-skills: efficiency design skill, passive device design skill, power magnetic reduction design skill, and power economy design skill. The RMSEA for the four-factor model is 0.042, suggesting a good fit to the data. We established the relationships between these sub-skills and SMPS performance metrics. Furthermore, the average of the factor scores from each of the imputed datasets and the SMPS design constraints were combined to obtain the cut-off scores to evaluate engineering students’ achievements in these sub-skills. Finally, we constructed an SMPS magnetic components material knowledge graph, which could recommend specific experimental tasks, relevant knowledge areas, and SMPS performance metrics, providing personalized guidance to designers.