IEEE International Future Energy Challenge 2009

Peter Freere and students from Cologne University of Applied Sciences

Monash University was delighted to host seven finalist teams from Brazil., China, Germany and the USA, who came to Australia for 15-17 July to compete in the IEEE Future Energy Challenge competition. The project was to design and construct a wind turbine power output maximiser for a 200W wind turbine, charging into a 12V battery. Their wind turbine controllers had to maximise the power taken from the wind turbine, regulate the battery charging process, and simultaneously protect the wind turbine from overspeeding and potentially destroying itself. All teams presented magnificent designs, but the punishing test regime of wind speeds up to 13m/s, 4 minutes of dynamic wind speed variation, disconnecting from the load at rated wind speed, and an output short circuit, pushed their systems to their limits.

With lazy smoke from some systems, jets of smoke and flames from others, building a robust maximum power point tracker for a real wind turbine that operates in many regimes proved very challenging for all teams. Even for those that worked well under steady state wind conditions, effective operation under dynamic wind variation was clearly much harder to achieve.

Overall First Prize for the competition went to the team from the University of Central Florida, who were also awarded the wind turbine maximiser prize of a brand new 200W wind turbine, complete with a 4 metre tower. The IES Outstanding Power Electronics Innovation Prize went to the University of Cologne team whose maximiser was the only one to survive the testing intact. The complete prize summary is listed below.

Thanks

We would particularly like to thank the sponsors that made this Future Energy Challenge both possible and so much fun. The sponsors include:

IEEE, Power Electronics Society, Industrial Electronics Society, Power Sources Manufacturers Association. Sustainability Victoria, Suzlon Australia, Garrad Hassan Pacific, Roaring 40s, Fastron, Century Batteries, Plasmatronics. Monash University ,Wind Tunnel, Faculty of Engineering, Dept. Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Power Electronics Group.