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 “Dynamcis 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 understanding of the control of wind turbines 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 “Wind turbine rotor in turbulent inflow” is connected to the research group Turbulence, Wind Energy and Stochastics (TWIST). In this seminar, turbulent wind fields and their effects on wind turbines will be investigated. The students learn to work with measured data from the open field and perform own experiments with a model of a wind turbine in a turbulent wind tunnel.

The seminar “Meteorological station data and numeric modeling” is based on the work of the research group Energy Meteorology (EnMet). Here, the students get a deeper understanding of the atmospheric boundary layer and its characteristics that are important for the utilisation of wind energy (vertical profiles, thermal stability etc.). The seminar offers research based learning by simulation of flow situations and analysis of real measured open-field data from meteorological masts and LIDAR devices by the students.

The seminar consists of three main phases with different learning steps:
1st phase: Class-room seminar
• building up basic competences
• identification of the technical tasks
• introduction to current research
• introduction to the learning platform
• investigating standard situations and functional interaction by means of the experimental system
• defining an own research question
• defining an experimental strategy
• planning the experiment
2nd phase: Laboratory work (1 week)
• 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