As the university in its mission seeks to contribute to the development of society, it contributes in many collaborative projects with the Lebanese industry under the umbrella of LIRA projects (Lebanese Industrial Research Achievements). Some of these projects aim to improve the energy efficiency and clean energy:

• Project: Smart MPPT Charge Controller for a Solar PV

Brief Description: The main purpose of this project is to design a DC/DC converter that will enable the inversion of a DC power source, supplied by Photovoltaic (PV) Cells, to a controlled DC bus that will be used to connect to a batteries bank. The system will be controlled to operate at maximum efficiency using Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm and using the powerful charging algorithm for battery bank (multi-stage charge control). 

Industrial partner: EMCO Electronics

Academic year: 2017-2018

 

• Project: Self-Cleaning system for Photovoltaic (PV) Cells

Brief Description: Accumulation of dirt or particles like dust, water, sand and moss on the surface of solar photo-voltaic panel obstruct or distract light energy from reaching the solar cells. This is a major problem since the light obstruction materials pose as external resistances that reduce solar photo-voltaic performance. As one of the promising solution for the electricity problem in Lebanon, installing PV will face the problem of cleaning accumulated dust or dirt. The project realized a smart system that solves the problem of dust or dirt accumulation over the installed PV modules. The system is capable of monitoring large number of distributed PV modules, and uses artificial intelligence to avoid misusage of energy in powering the cleaning system and wasting water used in cleaning the panels. This will lead to increase the energy efficiency of the PV cells.

Industrial partner: EMCO Electronics

Academic year: 2018-2019

On the other hand, the university gives the industrialists access to the labs of the Faculty of Engineering for testing and research purposes. The labs used for this intent are: Power Electronics lab, Control Labs, Electronics Labs. Lab open for industrialists

Scientific research also takes a significant place in this topic, there are several papers in the field of clean energy that have been published in international conferences by the Faculty of Engineering members. The following are samples of the research work:

• A. Taleb, J. Haydar, W. Fahs and A. Mokdad, “RBF Neural Network Model to Increase the Performance of Solar Panels,” 2019 International Arab Conference on Information Technology (ACIT), Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, 2019, pp. 209-213, doi: 10.1109/ACIT47987.2019.8990981.