The Use of Small Wind Turbines in Undergraduate Teaching Projects

R. Dhulst, G. Desmet, J. Driesen, R. Belmans Electrotechnical department ESAT-ELECTA Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee (Belgium) Tel: +32 16 32 10 20 Fax: +32 16 32 19 85 reinhilde.dhulst@esat.kuleuven.be

Summary
Often, in engineering education there is much emphasis on theoretical issues, especially during the initial undergraduate years. Still, students should be exposed to more than just theoretical knowledge. This paper describes a project-oriented approach to undergraduate teaching in the eld of electrical power engineering applied in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the K.U.Leuven University, Belgium. This example of a project-based course deals with renewable energy. First students learn the possibilities and potential of renewable energy in Belgium. Subsequently they apply their knowledge just gathered, and nally they make their own green power plant with the use of a small wind turbine. Thereby the students are put into contact with the functioning of a wind turbine, its limitations, the use of power electronics and control and the concepts of green power in a liberalized electricity market with green power certicates.

Introduction

The engineering education at the K.U.Leuven University in Belgium consists of three Bachelor years, divided in 6 semesters, and a two-year Master of 4 semesters. During the rst three semesters of the bachelor program, which is identical for all disciplines, the students mainly follow general science and engineering courses. To experience how the knowledge of this general science is used in real life, each semester the students participate in a project-oriented course. This paper describes one of the projects oered to the students during the third semester. The project deals with renewable energy, particularly with wind energy. The project is assigned to a team of six students.

2
2.1

Engineering Education
Engineering studies at the K.U.Leuven

As mentioned before, engineering studies at the K.U.Leuven comprises three Bachelor years, followed by a two-year Master. The rst three semesters of the Bachelor program are general oriented, the students receive a basic science education. After the third semester, students have to indicate two elds in which they want to specialize further. Therefore they have to choose a major (60% of technical courses) and a minor (40%) out of eight options: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, materials engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, mining engineering and industrial engineering. After another three semesters of 1

Bachelor education, the students can start in a Master program, which is done by the vast majority of students. Each major-minor combination of the Bachelor program leads to at least one Master program. For instance, after a major in electrical engineering and a minor in mechanical engineering, students can choose the master program of Energy Engineering, or several other Master programs.

2.2

Project-oriented courses

During the rst three semesters of the Bachelor program, the students are obliged to participate in a project-oriented course. This course is meant to enable the students to apply their basic science knowledge. Divided in six-person teams, they have to solve some real-life problems. These courses stimulate the problem-solving capabilities of the students. Several methods oered in dierent courses have to be used or combined and students learn to work in teams. In the rst project, planned in the rst two semesters, dierent teams of students pursue the same design goal, so every student basically has to do the same design task. The second project, oered during the third semester, is totally dierent. These projects are organized by the dierent engineering departments. Students choose a department, and a project. This way they get the opportunity to get to know a department better, before choosing a major-minor program. The project, further described in this paper, is organized by the department of electrical engineering.

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3.1

Didactical considerations
Division in groups

The topics for the project-oriented courses are suggested by the six departments of the Faculty of Engineering. Students have to choose one project from each department, and rank the dierent proposals according to their preference. They have a certain time window to do so. Six students are then allocated to each project, taking their preferences into account as much as possible. By dividing students into groups in this manner, motivation of the students will be stimulated. Students are able to make a well-informed choice according to their own interests between the available project proposals. This would not have been the case with a rst-come-rst-serve principle. Another advantage of this method is that students have no inuence on the constitution of their team. This way they learn how to cooperate, which is of major importance for their later professional life.

3.2

Integration of courses and skills

Characteristic for a project-oriented course is the necessary integration of dierent skills and knowledge obtained in dierent courses. On one hand technical knowledge has to be put into practice, on the other hand soft skills concerning working in team, giving presentations, reporting and project planning are developed. What specic technical knowledge has to be applied depends on the projects theme. Nevertheless, in most of them a considerable amount of the subject matter discussed during the rst year of education will prove to be useful. Moreover, during the third semester several seminars and additional introductory lectures are organized by professors to provide the students with all knowledge necessary to be able to execute their project. Some of these seminars are compulsory for all students disregarding in which project they are involved, such as a seminar on the use of mathematical software and on design methods. Other seminars are optional or only compulsory for students working on a certain project as they are intended to introduce a certain specic knowledge required for the projects completion. Not only technical knowledge is important in project-oriented courses. Also social skills play an important role in this kind of education. Competencies of working in a team, reporting and project planning, which the students acquired during the rst project-oriented course, have to be put into practice. During the third semester an additional seminar on presentation techniques was

organized. Teaching assistants are available during the entire project, in case students desire additional information on some topic. Meetings are twice a week. Nevertheless, students are encouraged to work independently and only address the teaching assistants for feedback.

3.3

Evaluation

The main evaluation criteria of the students-projects are both written and oral presentations. A written report is expected of the students both in the middle of the semester and at the end of the project. By receiving feedback on the rst report, the students can adjust their strategy if necessary. Because of this interim feedback, misunderstandings leading to surprises at the nal evaluation ought to be avoided. At the end of the project, the students are supposed to give an oral presentation to present their work and their results. A demo-day is also organized by the faculty, where every project-group has the opportunity to show the result of their projectwork to their colleagues. The project-result naturally is important but it is not the only aspect determining students marks since a project-oriented course is open-ended. Neither students, nor teaching assistants can predict the (details of the) nal result. Consequently, not only the nal result but also the process and the work done by the students is considered evaluating their project. Two less important means of evaluation are an individual question, to be answered by each student, and a peer-assessment. At the end of the project-oriented course every student individually has to answer a question on the project that was worked on. Additionally, students are asked to assess the work of other members of their group. Depending on the answer on the individual question and on the opinion of the other team members on a students work, small dierences in the marks of members of the same group are possible. Last two means of evaluation are used to avoid free-riding. By rewarding those who were very involved in the project and reprimanding the free-riders, students are more motivated.

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4.1

Description of the project

Introduction to green power production

The goal of the rst part of the project is to provide the students with some basic knowledge on electricity production, electricity grids, in particular green power production and its particularities,. . . In an introductory seminar the structure of the Belgian electricity grid and the (non-renewable) power production in Belgium is explained. Next, the students have to do some research by themselves on which possible renewable sources of energy exist, and what the potential of each source is given the Belgian climate and geographical conditions. The purpose of this exercise is to get the students acquainted with both the advantages and disadvantages of renewable energy. They have to nd out which forms of renewable energy production are mostly used in Belgium nowadays, how much electricity is produced each year by these production units and what the predicted maximal amount of green power production is for Belgium. Another topic on which the students have to do some research is the system of green-power-certicates in Belgium (portfolio obligation): what it implies, for who it is meant and what is hoped to be achieved with this system. In a next step, wind energy is studied in more detail. Students nd out how a wind turbine works, what its main components are, where these turbines are best placed, etc. They also get the specications of a small 400W axial wind turbine, the one that will be used in the second part of the project. With these gures they are supposed to calculate how many of these turbines will be needed to fully cover their own energy consumption. For these calculations the simplication is made that every joule of energy generated by the turbine immediately and always can be used, thus the availability of an indenitely large battery bank is assumed. They calculated that a total amount of about 18 of these small turbines would be necessary. This calculation lets the students realize that they consume lots of energy, and that generation with renewable sources of this energy is not that simple.

Table 1: Student calculations of their own energy consumption compared with wind turbine generation Monthly energy consumption 89 kWh Average wind speed 3.2 m/s Average monthly energy output 5 kWh

4.2

Design of a small green power plant

The second and main objective of the project is the making of a small green power plant, with a small wind power generation unit of 400W [1], of the type Air-X. In a rst step, the wind turbine is placed on the roof of the electrical engineering building, with the students working out where and how.

Figure 1: The Air-X wind turbine, placed on the roof of the Department of Electrical Engineering at K.U.Leuven. The generator is a brushless DC-machine of which the output voltage is rectied and regulated in such a way that the generator can be directly connected to a set of batteries. A next step in the creation of the power plant is the making of the grid connection. The students had to design an inverter, so that the wind power unit can be connected to the electricity distribution grid and no batteries have to be used anymore. Moreover, the power produced can be sold in a liberalized electricity market and an extra income from green-power-certicates, important in the Belgian system of portfolio obligation. First the basics of power electronics and control are explained to the students (a.o. [2]). To implement the inverter, a rapid prototyping platform for power electronic systems is available [3]. This platform consists of a freely programmable processing core and an inverter comprising four half bridges. The processing core of the platform is composed of a DSP and an FPGA-board. The DSP programme can be written directly in 4

C-code or the user-friendlier MATLAB/Simulink-environment can be used. The inverter rst has to boost up the output voltage of the power generation unit. This is done by means of a simple DC-DC boost converter. One IGBT-bridge is used, and the generation unit is connected through an inductor to the inverter. This type of converter is not the most ecient one, certainly not if an output voltage of about 12V has to be boosted up till 350V. This converter is used anyway because of its simplicity and because the functioning is easy to understand. In a next step, the boosted up DC-voltage has to be inverted to the 50Hz grid voltage. This is done by two IGBT bridges. To lter the switching frequencies out of the inverter voltage, a LCL-output lter is used. Both the DC-DC boost converter, and the DC-AC inverter are switched through Pulse Width Modulation.

Figure 2: The used setting of the grid-connected power production unit. The students initially designed the controller of the inverter in Simulink. The DC-link voltage of the inverter has to be maintained on a constant level, this is done by a simple PI-controller. The output voltage of the generation unit has to be controlled to the right level. The output voltage of the wind-generator has to be kept under 14V, otherwise the generator shuts down. The control of the output voltage is done by a PI controller. The control of the output voltage at the grid connection would be too dicult for the students to implement. Instead, a controller is given to them to use as a black box [4].

Figure 3: The used MATLAB/ Simulink control scheme of the inverter. The nal step of the project is of course the testing of the whole set-up. Some testing and optimization of the controller had to be done. Finally (a little bit of) green power was produced. Hence, the main goal of the project was achieved. The students also were quite satised with this result. Energy outputs were compared to earlier predictions. Average wind speeds seemed a lot less than the earlier assumption of 3.2 m/s, based on numbers of a nearby weather station. 5

The inuence of trees and buildings induced turbulence is not known, but can denitely not be neglected.

Conclusion

In this paper, project-oriented courses in the undergraduate power engineering programs are discussed. The project-oriented approach has several advantages: students learn to work in team, motivation is stimulated, knowledge and skills acquired in dierent domains are integrated and students work independently on a topic in which they are interested. By organizing this course closely before the choice of specialization, it gives the students the opportunity to nd out which domain really interests them. Project-oriented courses incorporate a certain risk of failure. In case of success, the students experience such courses as very rewarding. In the project presented in this paper, students were able to accomplish the main goals.

References
[1] Southwest Windpower. Air-X land Owners manual Southwest Windpower, 2002. pp 5-48. [2] N. Mohan, T.M. Undeland, W.P. Robbins, Power Electronics. Converters, Applications and Design, Third Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2003, pp. 161-244. [3] J. Van den Keybus, B. Bolsens, K. De Brabandere, J. Driesen, Using a fully digital rapid prototype platform in grid-coupled power electronics applications, presented at the 9th IEEE Conference on Computers and Power Electronics (COMPEL 2004), Champaign-Urbana, USA, 2004. [4] B. Bolsens, K. De Brabandere, J. Van den Keybus, J. Driesen, R. Belmans, Model-based generation of low distortion currents in grid-coupled PWM-inverters using an LCL output lter, presented at the 35th IEEE Annual Power Electronics Specialists Conference, Aachen, Germany, 2004. [5] G. Boyle, Renewable energy. Power for a sustainable future, Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2004.