Impacts on the Output Power of Photovoltaics on Top of Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This article investigates the potential output power of photovoltaic (PV) installation on the top of the battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and the hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). First, we discuss the available area on the roof of the BEVs and HEVs for deploying the PV cells. Second, we verify the impact of the vehicle curved roof surface on the available output power of the PVs. More precisely, we present a method of calculating the effective area of PV cells, useful for PV simulation models, and calculating the available output power of the PV cells with different longitudinal angles. We verify our method within the experiments and present the results of them, showing that the model predicts the output power of the PV cells with an accuracy better than 2.5%. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of the curved surface and ambient conditions on the possible interconnections of the PV cells. Here, we present the considerations for both stationary and moving conditions to highlight the difficulties for interconnecting PV cells to form PV panels. From our experimental results, for frequent changes in the available solar radiation level, we can see a difference in terms of output power larger than 75% between the series and parallel interconnections of PV cells.