Design and Energetic Evaluation of a Mobile Photovoltaic Roof for Cars

Hybrid electric vehicles, associated with photovoltaic panels, are gaining interest mainly for two reasons: the increasing attention on the recourse of green transports and the production of electricity by a gratis and largely diffused source of energy, the solar one. Previously a considerable gain of solar energy for tracking system instead of fixed horizontal photovoltaic ones has been demonstrated and validated by historical data taken from an online calculator PvWATTS. Otherwise, there is a difference between solar tracking systems for fixed pants and for mobile applications. In this paper a prototype of a tracking solar system for vehicles and the energetic analysis has been presented. After the presentation of the system adopted, geometric optimization, it has been presented the energy evaluation: there is the computation between energy solar gain, mechanical energy spent to move the roof and energy losses, computed with a MATLAB® tool named SimMechanics™.