Solar Electric Powered Hybrid Vehicle

Abstract

The renewable energy is vital for today’s world as the nonrenewable sources that we are using are going to get exhausted in near future. The solar vehicle is a step in saving these nonrenewable sources of energy. The basic principle of Solar/Electric Powered Hybrid Vehicle (SEPHV) is to use energy that is stored in a battery during and after charging it from a solar panel. The charged batteries are used to drive the motor which serves here as an engine and moves the vehicle in reverse or forward direction. The electrical tapping rheostat is provided to control the motor speed. This avoids excess flow of current when the vehicle is supposed to be stopped suddenly as in normal cars with regards to fuel. This idea, in future, may help to protect our fuels from getting extinguished. This view ignited us to develop SEPHV. This multicharging vehicle can charge itself from both solar and electric power. The vehicle is altered out of a two-wheeler vehicle by replacing its engine with a 48 V brushless DC (BLDC) motor. Supply to the motor is obtained from a battery set of 12 V, 24 AH. The household electric supply of 230 V is reduced with a step-down transformer to 48 V and then it is converted to the DC with a rectifying unit to charge the battery of four solar panels. Each with a rating of 20 Watts are attached to the top of the vehicle to grab the solar energy and is controlled with the help of MCB controller. The SEPHV can be driven by 48 Watt BLDC motor consisting of four 20 Watts photovoltaic (PV) panel in the voltage rating of 18.38 V. The power which is absorbed by the PV panel is stored into the four 24 AH 12 V batteries. When there is absence of sun, electric power supply act as an auxiliary energy source. For controlling speed of the motor, a switch is designed with four tapping, provided with different values of resistance at each tapping. It acts as a speed control switch for SEPHV. This type of technique is developed to reduce the running cost and increase the running efficiency of the vehicle. The performance of SEPHV was found to be satisfactory for the load of four people with the average speed of 40 Km/h. The total cost of the vehicle is 18000 INR.