An electric mini van powered by Lithium ion Batteries that recharge from solar panels and wind chargers on the roof of it. While the vehicle is in motion, it should charge right? Also Lithium ion Batteries can give you up to 250 – 400 miles per charge. So what would be the potential problems with this and why hasn’t anyone done it yet?
There are plenty of people who have been converting cars to electric running vehicles since the mid 70s 9maybe even before then), and some of them move up to speeds of 80mph.
But what about the idea of the propulsion or stationary position of the vehicle itself doing the charging. It might take some time, but after the initial investment, insurance payments and general maintenance costs re all that would be left. No stops at the gas station, no fluid changes (except transmission). So when is someone going to build it?
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I don’t think it’s as good as the 100% hydrogen car. It runs on water and there’s no pollution.
It is more efficeient and cheaper to put the solar pannels & wind turbine on the garage or elsewhere where they can be optimally sited: for sun, sutaibly angled and avoiding shading;
for wind away from turbulance and as high as possible;
or you can use Combined heat and power system with an office, or take advantage of larger more efficient grid connected renewable energy source that are already provided and maintained by the electric company.
plus grid connection means you can sell unused electric back to the grid http://www.udel.edu/V2G/
plus this saves top heavy weight and aerodynamic drag on the car and having to design the wind turbine/solar pannels to cope with the vibration and stresses of being on a car. (if a wind turbine produced more power than the drag induced then you would have perpetual motion!)
Many people talk about putting a windmill generator on top of a car but they don’t understand that it can’t possibly generate enough juice to recharge the juice used to propel the car.
As said above, better to put windmill & solar panels on your roof with a bank of batteries to store the power, then recharge your car at night.
Check out the Googleplex. They covered the whole roof and carports with PV and employees can recharge elec car while they work.
Windmills on cars will NEVER work. Why? Because every windmill you add increases the drag on the car. More drag increases the energy required to overcome that drag. Because of the laws of thermodynamics and inherent inefficiencies in electricity generation, the energy you gain from the windmill will ALWAYS be less than the energy required to overcome the extra drag. All a windmill will do is drain your battery faster.
As for solar panels, as another poster said, they’re much better placed on land somewhere and then used to charge the car through a plug. Putting them on a car just means extra weight to carry around (requiring more energy), as well as the inability to orient the panels in such a way so as to get the most amount of sun possible.
Lithium is good…if you can bear the cost.
Wind generators on the car would never be large enough to be effective, plus the weight/drag is counter productive.
Photovoltaics (actually not that heavy…my college had a solar race car that did very well, Rose-Hulman Solar Phantom — 1997) are just going to add to the high cost since you want to include Li-ION…and what if you drive in urban/parking garage/tunnel, it does nothing.
It’s called a solar car. It has been done. However, even with the car completely covered in solar panels, the total amount of solar energy coming down on the car is not enough to charge the car in a reasonable amount of time.
Unless you’re going to park it for 2 month stints in the desert in Arizona between your “400 miles per charge” (where the hell did you get that? no electric cars can manage more than about 50-100) it will only provide a small amount of the energy the car needs.
Read what fred has to say about putting solar panels and a wind mill on a vehicle. As he says, there are more efficient options. Then if you think you still might like to see how it could work check out this project of putting solar panels and a windmill on a mini van.1
If the owner had put both on his property instead of the van, the investment would still be working for him instead of the person he sold the van to.
Its not a new idea people have done this before. BUT the sun is not out an night and we do have rainy days reducing the solar panels output vastly.
Besides, to keep the vehicle running, the solar panels would have to be about 25 times the size of the vehicle itself. And the drag from the windmills when moving will cancel out their energy contribution. And the windmill would need to be at least 15 feet in diameter anyway.
It all makes for a really top heavy vehicle.
So far to be true,imagine you tell the rich arabs and other oil nations we don´t need the oil they have,must of this people have nuclear weapons?
Dev elope this kind of energy is not a profit for a lot of people,we can get a Clean air,but we can get a mad rich men,whit powerfull weapons to destroy our clean air and life’s?