Creation of a wind power conversion center at the National Engineering School of Sfax as part of the European WESET project

As part of the WESET (Wind Engineering Skills in Egypt and Tunisia) Final Conferences a meeting is organized at the University of Sfax on Saturday 3rd July.

The meeting is an opportunity for industry (the Tunisian Electricity and Gas Company STEG, the National Agency for Energy Management ANME, …)to meet university (professors, researchers, Master students, …).

The WESET Project is supported by the Erasmus + Programme, Key Action 2, Capacity Building in Higher Education.The WESET project supports the modernisation, development and internationalisation strategy of the partner Egyptian and Tunisian Institutions, aligning Master degrees with the needs of Industry and the Society, and creating links with European institutions.

The project will contribute to reduce the lack of engineers skilled in Wind Engineering in Egypt and Tunisia, which hinders the use of wind as a reliable, cost-effective and pollution-free source of energy.

This WESET project involves eleven partners, four European academic institutions (Spain: Valladolid, Italy: Roma, Denmark: Aalborg, France: Marseille), two Tunisian Academic Institutions (ENI-Carthage, ENIS-University of Sfax), five Egyptian academic institutions ( ASU, BUE, AASTMT, NREA, RCREEE).

The aim of the project is to transfer knowledge and technologies between experts from European, Egyptian and Tunisian institutions in the field of wind engineering and to strengthen links between universities and industry to train engineers with the skills to support the growth of the wind energy sector.

In this context, several activities have been addressed in the WESET project, which are the development of teaching modules for the training of Masters in higher education institutions, dealing with wind engineering. Furthermore, academic staff and master students with great potential have been trained in Europe using the Train the Trainer Approach in real-life Wind Engineering aspects and in the use of the training materials. Moreover, the creation of wind energy centres to provide practical work on wind engineering in partner countries. Besides, the staff trained will support the Wind Energy centres to sustain the project after the end of the project.

During this Final conference, Professor Mohamed Chaabane project manager and Dr.MariemGhamgui project coordinator had the opportunity to present the deliverables of this project, we can mainly mention the integration of the modules developed in the project framework in teaching of the Electrical Conversion of Renewable Energies engineers course, CEER of ENIS, under the responsibility of Professor Abdelmajid OUALHA and the Master of Electrical Systems & Renewable Energies, SEER of ENIS, under the responsibility of Professor LotfiKrichen, recently created in 2019. Mr Chaabane and Mrs Ghamgui also presented a report on the internships carried out either by teachers or engineering and master students to carry out training on wind energy. In addition, they presented the equipments acquired in the framework of WESET project, which represents an interesting support to ensure the practical work on wind turbine engineering. The overall cost of the project is in the order of five hundred thousand dinars.