Abstract:

Engineering students seek to be motivated by problems that connect with their lofty ideals. Nowadays, renewable energy is a very attractive topic to young people, who see the possibility of contributing to a cleaner world with their work. That is why renewable energies can be considered as an area of experimentation that encourages students to apply their knowledge in a practical and useful way.

Particularly, wind energy is a key pillar to ensure the future sustainability of many countries. Besides, it is a mature technology where real examples of the performance of the wind turbines (WT) can be presented and explain. Still, there are many engineering challenges related to wind turbines that must be addressed and are worthy to bring up.

To advance in this discipline it is fundamental to incorporate new researchers who innovate and apply recent methodologies and techniques in this field. To do so, a smart way to foster greater number of students in the engineering faculties and technological high schools is to proposed them issues that connect with their interests. The introduction of the WT control problem as a motivating, challenging and relevant problem for our future, is without any doubt a good starting point for these demanded research vocations to arise.

This work presents a problem-driven proposal to apply control concepts to wind turbines issues. It allows the student to put into practice fundamental control concepts such as: space of states, state variables, controlled variables, manipulated variables, observable variables, MIMO and SISO systems, linearity and linearization, controller design, and time and frequency response.

They will then learn how these devices perform and even build a small prototype to mimic them, to better understand all the problems related to this renewable energy explotation.

This didactic practical proposal is developed based on a set of mathematical contents, competences, objectives and an evaluation procedure

Keywords:

Wind turbines, control engineering, practice, motivation.