Solar Powered Car Can Get Close To 60 mph 119
Jason Sahler writes with this excerpt from Inhabit: "The World Solar Challenge across the Australian outback is coming up, and we're already seeing some truly incredible vehicles going for the gold. Take the Bethany, a solar powered vehicle designed by Cambridge University students. The vehicle is capable of achieving close to 60 miles per hour. Doesn't sound too impressive? Try doing it by using the power required to run a hairdryer."
Pushing the limits of tech (Score:5, Interesting)
This is very interesting technology. These solar races really produce odd looking vehicles. Three wheels makes sense in terms of rolling resistance, but I can help but think what might happen if it needed to take a turn fast.
Programs like this are great, and help push the technology envelope. Although it's neat that it can hit 60Mph...the article really does not have much real information in it.
I hope to see some of this technology filter down into production cars. I've always wondered how much power could result from the sunlight hitting the roof of my car all day long when I'm at work. Seems like there is potential missed opportunity there.
-Pete
Re:Pushing the limits of tech (Score:3, Interesting)
If you need to turn that fast you're probably screwed anyways. The friction on the front tires hasn't been the limiting factor for quite some time.
The much bigger problems are weight distribution and the rate at which the wheels spin with respect to each other. Hence the addition of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control [wikipedia.org] for more information.
And with only 3 wheels, that latter concern is easier to deal with than with the extra wheel.
Big whoop (Score:3, Interesting)
>"Try doing it by using the power required to run a hairdryer."
Hair dryers pull 1000~2000 watts, right? That is a ton. Try having only a few watts to work with...on Mars. [xs4all.nl]
"The transmitter on the lander has a broadcast power of about 14 watts, says Callas. For comparison, the beacon on the Mars Global Surveyor, which is currently in orbit 380 kilometers (228 miles) above the surface of the Red Planet, is weaker -- only 1 watt. Boding poorly for the mission is the fact that this week the sensitive Dish detected the weaker signal from the surveyor, but not the stronger signal from the lander.
But the main problem is the weakness of the signal. And signals weaken as they traverse the roughly 300 million kilometers (about 180 million miles) from Mars to Earth. "We expect a signal hitting the Dish to be something of the order of one billionth of a billionth of a milliwatt [one-thousandth of a watt] of power," says Callas. "It's extremely tiny. This is equivalent to listening to a cell phone from Mars.""
Re:Which means for the greenies... (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt we will see a sell-able fully solar powered car in our lifetime. As there are many concepts that make it impractical
Night Driving
Garages
Extended periods of poor weather.
Tree Coverage
Building coverage in Cities
However out of these competitions we come with a lot of good technology more then just solar power. The fact that you car powered off the energy of a hair dryer. Could be used in many mechanical devices longer lasting battery powered devices. Heck they could use the technology and make a more efficient hair dryer.
Re:No, not impressed. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was on the GW solar car team more than 10 years ago -- we could do 60mph back then, so I'm not impressed, either.
The important factors included: how much sun is there are the time, are you willing to drain the batteries, and are we going uphill?
If you've got good sun, don't have a screwed up array like we did in the '95 Sunrayce, and are willing to drain your batteries, it's easy to go over 60mph. And if you're going downhill, it's even easier.
Of course, that year they decided to put the finish line at the top of a mountain, and we had mostly clouds for the last few days, so just about everyone showed poorly overall.
Re:Going fast is easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
But surely systems like KERS show that with only a small weight penalty (from around 25kg), and a decent amount of power (~80bhp), you can already get there. Now as long as you don't need to be using that often, and can simply clutch it out while not using it, it's just 25kg of dead weight while trying to be efficient.
This is assuming that you've got another much more efficient lower powered motor for the rest of the time.
25kg just isn't such a huge weight to carry in any vehicle intended to carry 2+ people, and you don't need that much power to make a car perfectly good to drive, as long as it's not stupidly heavy.
Re:Pushing the limits of tech (Score:3, Interesting)
This is very interesting technology. These solar races really produce odd looking vehicles. Three wheels makes sense in terms of rolling resistance, but I can help but think what might happen if it needed to take a turn fast.
Just because it's three wheeled, or because it's this specific car? Three wheelers can be extremely stable [autospeed.com].
I've always wondered how much power could result from the sunlight hitting the roof of my car all day long when I'm at work. Seems like there is potential missed opportunity there.
The missed opportunity would be to put those precious solar cells on top of a car where you have to carry the weight around and the angles are poor rather than on a rooftop where you don't have to haul the weight around and where they can be positioned at an optimum angle.