These are just random thoughts I had. If anyone was inspired to make anything, please let me know and give me a slice of the profits. Thanks for your time.
Related posts:
- how can I charge an electric car with solar power?
- how can I run my electric fence charger with solar power?
- The Solar Electricity Handbook 2009: A Simple, Practical Guide to Using Electric Solar Panels and Designing and Installing Photovoltaic Solar PV Systems
- Where online can I buy a solar power panel that can charge up a simple car battery to full charge?
- Solar Electricity Handbook, 2010 Edition: A Simple Practical Guide to Solar Energy – Designing and Installing Photovoltaic Solar Electric Systems
December 10th, 2011 at 12:32 pm
They already make hybrids that have a solarpanel in the roof to help charge the battery, so no, this isn’t a new idea by a long shot.
December 10th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Solar power, yes. It likely isn’t possible to power the car for all its energy needs using exclusively car-mounted PV modules.
A typical car has a grade projection area of 8 square meters. At 1 standard sun (1000 W/m^2) of irradiance, and at 20% efficiency (AND THAT’S A STATE OF THE ART VALUE), the maximum DC power rating you could install on this car would be about 1.6 kW.
At a typical 5 sun-hours per day (assuming your drive doesn’t accomplish any significant longitude) of value of sunlight at flat surface, this amounts to 8 kW-hr of total energy availability per day.
Compare this to gasoline, which has a raw energy value of about 10 kW-hr per gallon. Involve a typical 30% efficiency of the internal combustion engine, and this results in 3 kW-hr per gallon worth of useful work output.
So, assuming that the charge controller-battery-motor system is 100% efficient (which it isn’t in practice, but in principle it can be if expensive enough), a typical day’s solar energy production for a car COVERED in PV modules would only supply the energy of about 2 gallons of gasoline.
This is OK if you are just using it for a daily commute, but not very good if you want to drive all day, and make some significant tracks.
Plus, seasonal variation and weather conditions can greatly hinder production. Cloud overcast may reduce the production to only a third of what it could otherwise produce on a clear day. Also, the value I gave of 5 sun-hours a day is only a typical annual average value. In the winter, it is actually as low as 2 sun-hours per day. In the summer, it can achieve 8 sun-hours per day. These of course are subjected to latitude location.
As for using “static electricity”, not a chance at all. Minor amounts of static electric charge that are created by accident are very difficult to store and release in an organized manner. Most often, they just dissipate as heat. If you try to make an organized static electric charge build-up, you would need to put work in to it, rubbing two dissimilar materials against each other, each wired to the terminals of a battery. It would essentially just be a very inconvenient design for an electric generator…and we already have a better design that puts magnetism to use.
December 10th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
There is a film out that you can see what cars like this (solar). It’s about a teacher who inspires her students to build a solar car good enough to compete nationally in the United States and internationally in Australia.
Follow this like to find out about the film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117427/
December 10th, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Solar cars are already used for solar races. The present top speed is 103km/hr (64mph 1) and there is one rather expensive solar car available for commercial purchase.2 But neither of these are practical for your daily commute as the vehicles are single passenger, use the most expensive latest tech and sacrifice all amenities to efficiency.
But powering a moving vehicle is not the same thing as charging a stationary one. A well designed electric car due to its inherent efficiency needs only the equivalent of about 1 gallon of gasoline, (33.4 KW-hr,) to go 100 miles.3 The Tesla roadster holds more storage than this (53 KW-hrs) while the Nissan Leaf and I Miev hold less (24KW-hr and 16KW-hr respectively.) Any of these vehicles could be charged during the daylight directly from a photovoltaic panel array. Some companies have designed public charge points that are powered by a solar panel array.4
However we generally want to use our vehicles during the day. Arrangements could also be made to use home Solar panels to sell electricity to “the grid” at higher daytime rates and charge the vehicle from the grid at lower, off peak nighttime rates. http://solarchargeddriving.com/news/solar-charged-driving/598-solar-powered-ev-charging-station-has-batteries.html In some places solar thermal power stations are being built and these will be part of the mix to supply electricity directly during the day and indirectly at night through Integrated thermal storage.5
The latest developments in static electricity have found that water vapor holds the key to static electricity in the atmosphere. http://electric-vehicles-cars-bikes.blogspot.com/2010/08/atmospheric-electricity-could-become.html The latest electrical storage devices (ultra capacitors) store electricity as a static charge. Someday it may be possible to tap into the power behind lightning.