Bringing renewable energy to the electrical engineering undergraduate education and research at UPRM

The development of systems implementing renewable energy sources is essential to society´s evolution and survival. Currently the major source for electric energy is the burning of fossil fuels; thus, it is a problem because of two reasons: it increases the emission of harmful gases to our atmosphere and it is an energy source that will not last forever. In our present time the amount of energy produced by a single renewable source is considerably smaller that the amount produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Therefore, it is necessary to develop energy systems that will use various type of renewable energy in parallel, all contributing to a large complex system. It is the purpose of this paper to attract undergraduate students to the area of renewable energy by bringing them with a research experience. The student had the experience to study three alternative sources: photovoltaic systems, fuel cells, and thermoelectric generators. The student had the opportunity to use electrical models describing the performance of each renewable source. The mathematical models were developed by the mentor in different software like Matlab, Saber, P-Spice, and Simulink. Circuit analysis, simulations and experiments are presented in the paper.