Curriculum Development into Renewable Energies Through Coupled Research and Applied Projects

Abstract

The Wind Energy Research Laboratory (WERL) has been a pioneer in promoting renewable energies by spinning off breakthroughs in research led by the laboratory experts to applied commercial and academic projects. The WERL has, over the years, promoted research and supported numerous academic and commercial ventures in renewable energies in diverse fields such as wind turbine aerodynamics, blade aeroelasticity, ice accretion modeling and mitigation, wind forecasting and wind turbine control. This chapter focuses on projects that aim at promoting a new training method in renewable energies which makes use of developments made in research to be applied in real-life projects through WERL-harbored laboratory ECO-UQAR. ECO-UQAR, a subsidiary of the WERL, is presently conducting research in diverse fields: wind potential assessment, wind turbine design, wind turbine control, multi-source energy coupling. Simultaneously, the ECO-UQAR is setting up a complete wind turbine-wind tunnel and solar panel-coupled energy source bench test to put forward both a physical renewable laboratory and a virtual laboratory based on the former one. The breakthroughs in these researches will be used in diverse projects. In this chapter we focus on research being conducted on the different quoted disciplines and the application of the different concepts in solving a water distribution problem via a humanitarian project. The concept of the whole laboratory is to promote research and training in the domain of renewable energies to incite a new curriculum development which triggers learning interest in complex research issues via applied projects.