Wind power generation is difficult to apply to cars, but photovoltaic power generation can be used in cars.
The main reason why wind power generation cannot be used in cars is that the wind turbine installed on the car will increase the resistance of the car. As wind resistance increases, fuel consumption will also increase. The reason why cars are designed to be streamlined is mainly to reduce the drag coefficient and air resistance when the car is moving. When air resistance is reduced by 10%, fuel consumption will be reduced by 2.5%.
Here, aerodynamicists work hard to reduce air resistance, and over there, they add a wind turbine. The pace of the aerodynamicists is simply maddening! With the addition of wind turbines, although they can produce electricityicity while driving, this is electricity obtained by increasing fuel consumption and has no practical significance. Energy will inevitably be lost after several conversions. It is better to directly use the motor to drive the generator to produce electricity with less loss. Wind technology is therefore not used in cars.
Solar generator technology can be applied to cars. Solar cells can be covered on the surface of the car and will not increase wind resistance like wind turbines. This has little impact on the car other than aesthetics, but solar panels have a problem with low conversion rates. The conversion rate for civilian battery panels hardly exceeds 20%, and most are around 15 to 17%. When the intensity of solar lighting is 1,000 watts/square meter, the electricity productionquoted for a square meter of panels can only be between 150 and 170 Wh.
The area of the car is limited, and the area of the battery panel is also limited. If there are two square meters of battery panels, the power generation power is only 150W. such as light intensity, angle, etc. must also be taken into account. Therefore, the power generated by solar panels is not high. If the lighting is good, the battery can be charged with 1 to 2 kWh of electricity per day. The electricity consumption of electric vehicles is at least 15 kWh/100 km. Charging for a day can only increase the range by a few kilometers, which has no practical significance. It can be used in low-power, low-speed electric vehicles, but it is not practical to use in cars.
But if high efficiency panels appear, the sol cellsareas and cars can be perfectly integrated. For example, the solar power test carried out on the Toyota Prius:
The solar panel used in the test car is said to have a conversion rate of up to 34% and an output of 840w output. On a sunny day, the electricity collected in one day can allow the car to travel 44 km.
However, it is currently in the testing phase. It can be seen that the car is covered with solar panels over a large area. The rear windshield, trunk lid, hood, etc. are damaged. are covered with panels. which affects the appearance to some extent. , battery panels with up to 34% efficiency are key. Low efficiency has no application value, and the high cost of high efficiency battery panels is also a factor affecting promotion.