Want To Make A Homemade Solar Car?
Question:
Answer:
It's not impossible at all, but you can forget to make a car for regular(I mean normal cars like Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes, Peugeot, VW...) use powered by sun. only special purposed prototypes are possible.
This because a normal car need quite a big ammount of power( Mini Cooper '60s is about 25kW) while solar radiation on Earth is about 1,3kW/m^2, so to move a Mini you would need about 20m^2 of solar arrays, but this is not exact, because solar arrays has not an efficiency of 100%, but usual(silicium) solar panels have only 10-15% of efficiency, and only the best solar arrays for space applications(AsGa) have a efficiency of 35%.
So to move a Mini Cooper you need about 133 m^2 of silicium solar arrays or 60 m^2 of gallium-arseniurum solar arrays, but this are incredibly expensive, only space agencies can use them in a large scale applications, and usually not larger than 10 m^2!!
In my university(Politecnico di Milano) a record car(the longest distance with 1 litre of fuel) is being developped, last year it performed about 340km with one litre, and this is powered by a bush cutter engine of about 1,6kW, so this special car would need about 8 m^2 of silicium solar arrays to be powered, and this will reduce the efficiency of the car that is aerodynamically designed, and a large surface will modify its charateristics.
But my advice is : "Try", but you might know that it's not so easy...good luck
possibly...but the car might get pretty hot
no
solar power does not yet create enough power to fuel a real life sized car.
and the small models are totally pointless
solar panels, to me, have no style.
i'd rather get a fuel burning Lambo
bad idea what would you do when the sun is absent
More Questions & Answers...