FER students show a growing interest in mobility

Project "Fair (FER) solutions for better community" has reached the finals of the most successful projects within EU Sustainable Energy Week . The most successful projects for clean, safe and efficient energy have been selected, and FER's project, in which our students participated, is among the finalists in the "Youth" category. About a dozen FER students were introduced to the problem of energy poverty, after which they performed simple energy audits in more than 100 energy-poor households in Zagreb, helping them to identify problems and then apply simple efficiency measures in their homes. Based on the results of the fieldwork, the students developed a model for estimating the energy needs of households. In addition, the obtained results are being used for development of policy proposals for combating energy poverty in the City of Zagreb and the development of models for the analysis of energy consumption and costs at the household level.

The aim of the project "Autonomous UAV inspection of wind turbine blades" (AeroWind) is to develop an autonomous visual inspection system which will use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), thus enabling inspection of wind turbine blades without stopping the turbine and interrupting energy production. The project is motivated by the fact that in order to keep wind turbine generators’ production optimised, most wind industry players inspect their blades at least once a year and plan maintenance based on the data collected. Hundreds of thousands of hard to reach wind turbine blades must therefore be inspected every year in Europe and around the world and existing visual inspection methods are rather slow, inaccurate, expensive and require complex coordination and logistics. Currently, visual inspection methods require the wind turbine to be stopped and specifically positioned in order to be inspected, leading to unavailability and causing significant loss of electricity production and income, especially with modern generators that surpass 10MW capacity. The AeroWind project started on 1 May 2020, and the project leader at FER is professor Stjepan Bogdan, PhD . FER is currently implementing 20 Horizon 2020 projects.

The interest of FER students in student mobility within the Erasmus+ program has been continuously growing every year. The results of the Erasmus+ Competition for students - study visit for the academic year 2020/2021 for program countries (KA103) demonstrate that FER has been recording a significant increase in outgoing student mobility for several years in a row. As many as 103 outgoing mobilities were approved, which is an increase of almost 20 percent compared to the previous year, and an increase of almost 70 percent compared to the academic year 2018/2019. It is interesting to add that FER is in third place at the level of the University of Zagreb in terms of the number of approved KA103 mobilities for this year. When it comes to countries that are of greatest interest to our students, Spain, Austria, Poland, Germany and Sweden proved to be the most popular. FER is also recording an increasing number of foreign students who want to spend one semester, and often an entire academic year, at FER. In the academic year 2019/2020, a total of 94 incoming mobilities was realised, which is an increase of almost 60 percent compared to the previous year. By far the largest number of foreign students come from Spain, followed by France, Portugal and Poland. Our Mobility Office and seven ECTS coordinators take care that every mobility, whether outgoing or incoming, goes smoothly. In addition, since the last academic year, all students who plan their mobility can find student feedback from previous years on the Intranet and thus make an easier choice of their host institution. FER has signed around 100 inter-institutional agreements, and the largest number of agreements has been signed with universities from Spain, France, Italy and Germany. You can see selected photos from the Erasmus + mobility of our students below.