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New challenges associated with power and energy and a rapidly retiring workforce have created a great demand for power and energy engineers from across engineering disciplines. Within this context, the Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky, a multidisciplinary engineering institute offering certificates in power and energy at the University of Kentucky has been created. A motivating observation guiding this educational program is that exposure to multidisciplinary ideas within the power and energy field will better prepare engineers from all disciplines for the types of multidisciplinary problems that they will encounter in their careers. As part of this program, a senior-/graduate-level course in electric power system fundamentals was created. This course is a core course within the power and energy program and is an option for undergraduate students and a requirement for graduate students studying within the program, including those who are not electrical engineers. Therefore, this course is intended for engineering students studying electrical engineering as well as those studying in other engineering disciplines. The fundamental challenge associated with this course is how to achieve the correct balance between sufficient technical rigor for an upper-level electrical engineering student and appropriate level for students with little electrical engineering coursework, a challenge that is significantly different than those experienced in teaching lower-level engineering courses to students in different disciplines. The ways in which this challenge has shaped course outcomes, prerequisites, textbook selection, and course structure are presented. Course assessment data (including exam-based assessment of outcomes and student selfassessment) as well as anecdotal evidence of how well this challenge is being met are discussed and analyzed. In particular, the performance of electrical engineering students and students from other engineering disciplines is compared for the various course outcomes. Lessons learned from offering this course are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar energy has emerged as a renewable, clean, reliable, and free source of energy encapsulated in photovoltaic (PV) cells. Studying the factors and parameters that affect the performance of these cells is significantly helping researchers to understand, design, develop, and optimize them. It has been reported that PV cell performance is highly affected by operating temperature. PV module temperature is a function of the incident radiant power density, the output electrical power, the thermal properties of the semiconductor material of the module, and the ambient temperature. Only part of the incident solar spectrum is converted into electricity, while the rest is dissipated as heat. This heat significantly increases the module temperature. Several researchers introduced thermal models to predict the module temperature, while others combined thermal and electrical models to get more accurate results. The radiant power density (W/m2) is used in these models as input power to the PV module. Despite of the extensive research, researchers failed to find models in the literature that investigated the effects of each wavelength of the spectral irradiance (W/m2/nm) on the module temperature. In this work, an integrated thermo-electrical model is proposed to predict the temperature of the PV module. In this model, the individual spectral irradiances are considered as input power sources to the module. Since the power associated with each wavelength varies during the day due to the airmass, the instantaneous temperature of the module is predicted over the entire day for a specific location. The calculated instantaneous output power is compared with the module's data sheet measurement and shows good agreement. Furthermore, research is planned to measure the module temperature experimentally, and these results are expected in the final version. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]