You know BMW is serious about improving efficiency when you hear they're equipping the M5 with a stop-start system. But what else have the bayerische wissenschaftlers been cooking up to improve efficiency? Auto Motor und Sport brings us up-to-date on the innovations unveiled by BMW at its unimaginatively named "Innovation Day 2008." One concept that's sure to have green chins wagging: solar roof panels designed to run the cars' electrical systems. BMW estimates a square meter of roofspace in northern European conditions could deliver 200 watts; more still if the entire roof's covered in photovoltaic cells. Solar panel could be used to reduce dependence on efficiency-sapping alternators for on-board systems, which could deliver small improvements to efficiency (0.3 fewer liters per 100km driven) or pre-heat the engine and fluids, improving inefficient cold start fuel consumption. Bimmer's boffins are also looking at generating electricity from excess engine heat. BMW claims that current thermodynamic generators from aerospace applications could deliver 200 watts of electricity today, with up to 1k watts available next Thursday (or so). The combination of thermodynamic generators, solar panels and engine pre-heating could yield a five percent increase in efficiency. We'll wait until we see a cost – benefit analysis, but the propeller people deserve credit where CAFE credit's due.
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Check out a company called konarka (they are building plastic based solar panels that you can literally print onto any surface to produce solar cells). Very interesting company.
Konarka looks like a new break through, as the present Photo cells are pretty expensive, one dealer told me the hydro costs had to go up quite a bt before we can afford photo cells.
Anythng can help.
No, the hydro costs don’t have to go up, because hydropower is very limited in availability. If there were a lot of hydro available in New England I’d be paying several cents per kwh instead of 16-18c/kwh.
Doesn’t matter what you suggest, the NIMBYs don’t want it. They’ll probably discover if you ate several pounds of those printable cells every day, you’d die in a matter of mere decades.
chuckR:
very nice!
@chuckR:
Too true. Cars, skyscrapers, skateboard, bicycles, and all kinds of things, if they didn’t exist already, would never get built today.
Sounds like something that would be best suited to a hybrid application, where the panels could charge the batteries whenever it’s in the sun.
Next we are going to see wind turbines inside the grills of cars that power the electronic devices.
So what happened to the BMW “Turbosteamer” from 2005? This was a gasoline-steam hybrid. It used heat exchangers to capture (otherwise wasted) heat energy from the engine exhaust and used this to drive a steam engine. It sounded like their prototype was quite successful.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4936/
@BlueEr03: Smokey Yunick tried that years ago as an alternative to running an alternator on race cars…. It was banned from competition.
few yrs back I bought one of those battery safer Photo charger. Thought that could save battery.
Upon reading it has enuf power for a small pen light with just about all day charging.
One u need a lot of surface space, like those Australian sunlight cars, shape like a Stingray.
This Konarka should be a very good product if it can reduce the manu costs. So more houses can utilize them just to reduce the lighting, heating , fridge costs. To zap enuf sunpower for a car driving us around will be a little ways away.
I tried to post this comment already, but it seems to have been lost in the ether, so here goes again:
So what happened to the BMW “Turbosteamer” from 2005? This was a gasoline-steam hybrid. It used heat exchangers to capture (otherwise wasted) heat energy from the engine exhaust and used this to drive a steam engine. It sounded like their prototype was quite successful.
If you look at the relative efficiency of an ICE, and electric, you find that about 9000 watt-hours of electricity roughly equals one gallon of gasoline burned. So if used effectively, 200 watts for say 8 hours parked at work would potentially replace about 1/5 th of a gallon’s worth of energy. Or about one dollars worth when gasoline hits $5 a gallon.
Of course, if you could stick up a panel 5 times that size in your work parking lot, you could gather a gallons worth of sunlight. That would take most people to their job and home again. If they ever do get thin flexible film PV’s working at 20% efficiency maybe every car will roll up a ‘sun sail’ when parked to gather most of the juice needed to drive to and fro when not parked.
Right now lots of this type stuff is about twice what it needs to be to make economic sense. With prices on oil going higher, and some of these electric gizmos getting lower(or more efficient) we aren’t long from such things being economical and practical for many uses.
Mandatory car covering at work – the energy recovered by the solar panels could help pay off the cost.
There are mouse pads that conduct electricity to power the wireless mouse on top (without electrocuting the user, of course). I’d like to see that applied to an EV vehicle.. park your car on a garage mat – no plugging in needed. Your car could be charged at work automatically, the funds deducted from your check, and visiting a gas station would be a thing of the past ;-)
of course, getting the batteries up to par might be a first step……
In addition to the solar cells, the car could have a series-parallel switchable 12V/24V battery stack and a thermopile integrated into the catalytic converter and cooling system to charge the batteries. This would eliminate the alternator, and allow the use of a smaller starter motor (24V). Short-term increases in electrical demand (which used to be covered by the alternator/voltage regulator) would be managed by switching the extra battery capacity into the 12V loop. One also has to rely on a level of inefficiency of combustion to keep the converter hot enough to supply power, possibly by increasing the fuel/air ratio to maintain cat temperature. You could easily gain 5% efficiency with such a system.
Or, just make it a hybrid drivetrain for the same expense, and get a 30% gain.
Solar panels are getting lighter, cheaper and more powerful every year.
Batteries are getting lighter, cheaper and more powerful every year.
Given the ability to convert sunshine and braking energy into useful electric energy to power an electric motor at low speeds it just seems so obvious that there’s a very efficient hybrid system that could be applied to virtually all new cars in the next decade.
maybe we should all just drive smaller cars. way easier.
gas tax.