A DIDACTIC PRESENTATION OF ELEMENTARY BOND GRAPHS FOR NON-ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Despite the power and simplicity of bond graphs (BGs), non-engineering students often think of them as "tools for theoreticians" - the notion of junctions just seems too abstract. In this paper a didactic heuristic approach to BGs by topological transformations of networks into hypergraphs and then into BGs is presented. Bonds, junction structures and construction methods are discovered "naturally" and thus are accepted by students. The definition of the relation between hypergraphs and BGs is discussed, and a proof is given inspired by Paynter's use of scattering variables of the sufficiency of 0 and 1 junctions for any energy domain. A Prolog program which deduces simulation routines in a student-oriented, human mimicking way is also briefly discussed.