RPowerLABS is offering internship/industrial training opportunities to interested undergraduates who seek such within the fields of
electrical engineering and computer science. The internship programme is tailored to help students within Nigeria who seek the put
to practice their theoritical knowledge using latest technologies.
There is an evident inadequacy within the Nigerian tertiary, of students with advanced computing capabilities. Advanced computing skills are mandatory for today and next-generation engineers and scientists that seek to be gainfully employed or those who hope to develop the complex engineering software tools and businesses that would empower the academia and industry.
At RPowerLABS, we are engaging in series of real-life research on the Nigeria Electric Power System using advanced computing tools and analytical methods. By taking part in this internship programme, the intern would be trained on basic to advanced computing skills and simulation techniques that we have employed in our laboratory. We have years of research and publication experience in the field of electrial engineering and computer simulation and the intern shall tap into some of the resources we have developed over the years and become better equipped to meet the huge technial challenges that awaits the next-generation scientists and engineers.
Electrical/Electronic engineering students and along with computer science students are the hub of the present and next-generation. A lot of things are determined by their capabilities in the academia, military, health, government, finance and business sectors. Without the tools these engineers would create, we would be well heading back into some 'stone' age.
This Internship or Industrial training focuses mainly on the electrical power system engineering and computer science domains with two major offerings:
- Electric Power System Simulation and Analysis using RPowerLABS Software (Electrical Engineering)
- Data Science/Scientific Computing using R Language and/or MATLAB/Octave (Computer Science)
There are internship opportunities for power system engineering students that want to experience the computer simulation of
power system analysis as it applies to real-life power systems and a blend of theory and practice while visiting some intricacies in system analysis with practical expositions. Also, hands-on supervised training on selected scientific computing tools that are
of interests to RPowerLABS are possible.
Example of the areas of power system analysis that shall be covered are:
- Power Flow Analysis
- Fault Studies
- Transient Stability Analysis (Single Machine and Multi-Machine)
- Transmission Line Analysis
- Economic Generation Dispatch and Optimal Power Flow.
These studies shall be performed on a Nigeria 330 kV Grid and a selected IEEE standard power system.
Those students that are willing to participate in both the electrical engineering and computer science internships shall be trained to write computer programs that solve electrical power engineering problems. This would enable them to becoming research engineers that are equipped to develop software
solutions that solve real-life academic or industrial problems.
There are internship opportunities for Computer Science/Engineering, Information Technology and Informatics students that want to experience the practical aspects of computer programming as it relates to data science and scientific computing. Also, hands-on supervised training on selected scientific computing tools that are of interests to RPowerLABS are possible.
Example of the areas of that shall be covered are:
- Introduction to R Language and MATLAB/Octave
- Statistical Analysis
- Numerical Analysis
- Data Visualization and Graphics
- Application of Scientific computing to electrical power system studies
Those students that are willing to participate in both the electrical engineering and computer science internships shall be trained to write computer programs that solve electrical power engineering problems. This would enable them to becoming research engineers that are equipped to develop software
solutions that solve real-life academic or industrial problems.
> The participant would gain hands-on insights as a power system operator, planner or research engineer by participating in our laboratory exercises
that are loaded with simulation case studies and experiments on the Nigeria 330 kV power system.
> Be trained from our learning experience gathered from Nigeria, UK and Germany.
> Discussion Forums and real-time collaboration with other participants from around Nigeria and beyond
> Highly involved and excellent interns could have a chance to be named in a research publication for which they were actively involved.
> Knowledge obtained within the programme would enable students to be able to undertake an internationally-recognized project/thesis topic at Bachelor, Masters and PhD level.
> Participants who wish, can have our support during their Bachelor, Masters, or PhD research.
> The applicant should have a letter/document from his school (Polytechnic or University) admitting that the applicant is supposed to be on internship or industrial training. Where such a document is not available, the applicant should inform RPowerLABS.
> The internship programme is planned to be mainly an online program so that this experience could reach many Nigerian students at the same time. This is because there are a lot of inadequacies in hands-on practicals within the Nigerian tertiary and this is the main driving force of RPowerLABS - to make-up for these deficiencies in the two domains. The applicants should have a personal computer or mobile device with a recent browser (Chrome or Firefox) and reliable Internet access from which they can connect to our Virtual Laboratory Environment.
> The applicant shall be willing to pay the monthly administration fee (mainly for lab tools) for the programme for a period of 3 months or 6 months or 12 months as the case may be. Students that shall be participating in the 6 months or 12 months package would have some months waived for them. This would depend on their performance and commitment during the programme. There is no separate application for this waiver.
> For applicants who need to sign and/or stamp their industrial training log books or those that require a letter of partipation, provision shall be made for this at a selected date for each student at their institutions or at our office in Port Harcourt. This decision would be made depending on the number of participants from a particular institution and other factors. It is possible to achieve this also by courier, but the applicant shall bear the expense (to and fro) in such a situation. Letters that can be sent via email shall be free of charge.
> For foreign applicants, participation in the program is possible. Please contact us at: info@rpowerlabs.org
The RPowerLABS project is a startup project with the vision of deploying online, a vast
array of highly demanded power system simulations for teaching and research using open source technologies. The projet hopes to assist electrical power engineering academics in developing nations who are restricted by costly commercial tools and give the developed nations a new tool with many
interactive, online learning and collaborative potentials. In our years of experience, we have had many undergraduate and postgrad students who are asked to research on thesis topic that involves computer simulation. In our judgment, almost 90% of them are not able, because the academic curricular does not adequately provide for this.
As an online virtual Power System Simulation Laboratory, RPowerLABS combines its web-based simulation elements to collaboration and other learning
features that are provided through integration with an open source Learning Management System (e.g. Moodle or Claroline). Currently RPowerLABS has been integrated with Moodle and hosted online on a cloud computing infrastructure.
RPowerLABS provides diverse simulations, lab manuals/exercises,
power system line diagrams, synchronous collaboration (via Chat) and lab quizzes on one web page at a time.
This explicitly means that a lab participant could perform his lab experiments, discuss with the lab coordinator and other group members and submit answers to lab questions on one
page at the same time with other participants.
As in a real laboratory, the simulations are preloaded with the required data for the sake of uniformity among all participants but their sessions are maintained differently.
See video demo here
Articles on RPowerLABS technology have been featured at international conferences and on major R news websites such as R-Bloggers and Revolution Analytics (now a Microsoft company). RPowerLABS participated at the International Conference on Electrical Power Engineering (ICEPENG 2015), Nsukka and iSTEAMS Conference 2015, Illorin.
View some of these articles here:
- RPowerLABS on Revolution Analytics
- RPowerLABS on R-Bloggers
- RPowerLABS on Open Electrical
- RPowerLABS at ICEPENG 2015 (pre-print)
For those applicants who wonder why they should pay an administrative fee for the internship, please visit the following link to read about internships at the Masdar Institute in UAE
Internships are highly competitive and are a great advantage for students. Also read about VIBE Internships in Germany at this link.
The internship program is structured to be an online program, considering the proliferation of online studies which appears to be the future of education in our ever-dynamic planet. Fortune 500 companies within the West are already hiring smart African brains to work online for their firms abroad especially in the field of computing and IT. This is exactly how Andela, is shaking up the traditional idea of hiring and getting top talents across Africa to work online for big IT firms.
The RPowerLABS Project hopes to reach many Nigerian and African students who never have one or more opportunities to do a computer simulation all their "academic-lives" due to inadequate academic infrastructure. Thereby, bridging the knowledge gap between theory and practice. However, we anticipate to have few scheduled meetings for those participants who are more relaxed with the traditional face-to-face mode of training as an ancilliary measure.
The smartest participants would have an opportunity to contribute program code to the RPowerLABS project.
The ultimate and priceless advantage: Learn first hand from the creator of RPowerLABS!
Electrical Engineering Dept.,
Purpose: Virtual Laboratory Studies for Power Engineering
Flavio G. C, (PhD computer scientist)
UFBA/UNIFACS, Brasil
Purpose: Doctoral Research on Computational Intelligence for Smart Grids
Read more here
RPowerLABS is happy to serve institutions, lecturers, researchers and students in the following ways: