The “Wind Physics Student’s Lab” aims to foster the learning processes in courses and seminars by own research activities of the students in wind physics. The course is offered in the scope of the initiative FLiF+ (German: “Forschendes Lernen im Focus”) at the University Oldenburg (see https://www.uni-oldenburg.de/flif/) and is organised as seminar with integrated work in the laboratory. Groups of two students each will investigate an individual, self-formulated research question and will be guided by the supervisors through the research-based learning process.

In order to introduce the students to current wind energy research, each of three research groups at ForWind – University Oldenburg will supervise one seminar in a certain field. These topical seminars will be offered in subsequent semesters or in parallel. Each semester the available seminars will be announced.
The seminar “Dynamics and control of grid-connected wind turbines“ is related to the work of the research group Wind Energy Systems (WESys). It intends to give a deeper insight into two fields of wind engineering: One is the grid connection and interaction of wind turbines and the other is their operational control as special case in the field of control engineering. The seminar uses an experimental system which allows to investigate control tasks and interaction mechanisms of the functional chain of wind field, rotor, drive train, generator, transformer and electric grid. The seminar consists of three main phases:
1st phase: Preparational learning
• building up basic competences
• identification of the technical tasks
• introduction to current research
• introduction to the experiment
• investigating standard situations, physical effects and functional principles by means of the experimental system
2nd phase: Research-based learning
• defining own research questions
• defining an experimental strategy
• planning the experiment
• set-up, execution, data acquisition and decommissioning of the experiment
3rd phase: Evaluation and documentation
• evaluating the experiment
• documentation with a short report (paper)
• presentation.