Software and information technology support in a virtual renewable energy laboratory, based on areal physical environment—ECO UQAR—UOM potential collaboration

Abstract

The present project aims to propose a new training approach based on communication and information technologies, which can be easily exported to different universities interested in growing and diversifying, such as the University of Mauritius. Specialized software and information technology is used to develop a virtual platform of a real, physical renewable energy laboratory, shared with different users and clients via VPN services and global web-based services. From an engineering point of view, the concept is simple, but the computer and information technology requirements are challenging. ECO-UQAR is a new entity created at the Université du Québec à Rimouski, and aims to provide “learn by projects” training in the field of renewable energy. A physical laboratory has been set up for this purpose. The physical set-up consists of a wind blower, wind turbines, solar panels, irradiation systems and other standard equipment. The whole laboratory is completely instrumented. Specialized software is used for data acquisition, data transfer and data processing. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the virtual environment that is set up using LabView, the data transfer from remote wind turbine installations to the laboratory, the data acquisition within the laboratory, and the security involved in using such a system. Specialized training is offered on high-level software, as a final step. This paper focuses on one particular project, whereby such software is used to illustrate the computational challenges involved in the use of specialized high-level software.