Idea of the virtual rolling mill laboratory

Laboratory tests are crucial in education and training of engineers. Experimental equipment and process simulators are extremely expensive. It is not possible and justified economically to build such laboratories, for educational purposes, in large number of schools. On the other hand, education and training based on video films, etc., is not adequate and personal contact of students with a process is absolutely necessary. Thus, the solution of virtual ring-rolling laboratory connected with e-Learning platform is proposed in this paper. Due to this approach students of metallurgy and materials science faculties will be given the possibility of performance of real experiments using remote controlled equipment and will be able to observe the results while being far from the real laboratory. The details of the idea of such virtual laboratory is presented below including its design, functional requirements description and future perspectives.