Automation and Renewable Energies: Outreach Efforts in Brazilian Public Schools
Abstract
The progress of an outreach project, “Automation and Renewable Energies” (ARE), is discussed in this paper, as well as its methods/procedures and the preliminary results achieved. The ARE project has the goal to visit local public schools, in the region of Florianópolis; the core of the outreach is to disseminate results achieved recently by the Renewable Energy Research Group (GPER), aiming to encourage these high-school students to be future Control and Automation Engineers (CAE) with focus on Renewable Energy Sources (RES), bringing to them the association between this degree and its application to renewables. The project methods include the development of scaled renewable energy testbeds; these small mockups make an allusion to why control-oriented purposes are of most important to the RES context, since they can maximize efficiency and allow their adequate integration to modern networks. Key-words: Control Engineering; Renewable Sources; Outreach; Brazil; Public Schools.