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

This paper investigates the potential output power of a photovoltaic (PV) installation on top of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). Firstly, we discuss the available area on the roof of BEVs and HEVs for deploying PV cells. Secondly, we verify the impact of the vehicles curved roof surface on the available output power of photovoltaics. 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 PV cells with different longitudinal angles. We verify our method within experiments and present the results of them, showing that the model predicts the output power of PV cells with an accuracy better than 2.5%. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of the curved surface and ambient conditions on possible interconnections of PV cells. Here, we present 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 series and parallel interconnections of PV cells.