Research and application of digital electrical substation virtual engineering education system

The education and training of electrical substations play an essential role for college students and engineers majoring in electrical engineering. However, to ensure the substation's safety production and equipment operation, it is difficult for personnel from external units to enter the site for learning. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a virtual interactive training technology method to author an interactive virtual maintenance education system (VMES) for electrical substations. The system aims to build a visual training and education platform for virtual substations to help learners master the station's equipment, operation, maintenance, evaluation, and other processes. Firstly, the system establishes a component‐level virtual interaction element to encapsulate an electrical substation virtual maintenance model that dynamically responds to user operations. The equipment structure and system environment are visually modeled using engineering modeling software. Secondly, a virtual interactive training system is created with the functions of 3D disassembly training, fault tree reliability evaluation, and AHP‐FCE maintenance assessment. Finally, through four operating systems, we evaluate the compatibility of the VMES, and we recruit learners to evaluate and discuss emerging and common educational models. The practical application results prove that the system can significantly improve students' learning efficiency and interest. Meanwhile, due to the increased number of interactive operations in VMES, participants can proficiently master the composition and working principles of equipment in substations, and cognitive load can be reduced.