Entice students to power engineering using renewable energies undergraduate projects: example of development and application of wind turbines prototyping software under Matlab/Simulink®

Abstract

Electrical Engineering and more particularly Power Engineering at the undergraduate level is facing a crisis at many French universities in terms of enrollment. One reason is the attraction of “newer” areas like computer engineering, which seem to excite the students more and pay higher starting salaries. In this difficult context, a significant educational investment is necessary to excite the students and entice them into Power Engineering. An area that students universally find interesting is alternate energy systems based on a renewable energy supply like wind. What is interesting with this area is that it includes the fundamental material that already exists in many energy conversion courses. Therefore, in this paper the authors present the development of a wind turbine prototyping software under Matlab/Simulink® through undergraduate student projects within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Professional Institute (IUP GEII) at Amiens, France [1]. This software was developed by a group of three students of the Institute third and final year. It was then used by another group of three students of the Institute second year to realize a wind energy system model.