Solar Electric

I ran across this today:

http://gizmodo.com/171873/e+v-sunny-bicycle-powered-by-the-sun



Those wheel covers, although pretty cool, don't look like solar panels to me. Is this for real?

Kellan

And it will only take a week and a half with the bike lying in the sun to charge 24v 17 ah.

Nothing to do with solar panels, but how much do side winds affect a bike with the wheels filled in like that instead of spokes?

Solar panels that... reflect light? :lol:

Maybe they're tweaked to absorb only UV and Infrared

i think its proof of concept. putting weight in the wheels is a bad idea imo. but you might be able to get 40W(peak) out of the wheels. practically would only be 20W or less tho. sun only shines 8 hours a day so it would take 3 days to fully charge a large battery. small 200w ebike could get charged in a day.

Hmm, I was thinking about 10 watts, and even in my area the solar insolation is only about 6 hours a day average. But I suppose you could get it to 8 hours if you went out and repositioned the bike every hour. Or you could plug in a small charger for about an hour for the same charge. It's shocking to realize that on a sunny summer day 16 hours long there is still only a few hours of peak power production from a solar panel.

Carrying around the solar panel is ok for keeping an auxilary battery charged, like for a headlight that needs only a very small panel, but to keep an ev pack charged it is really not worth the weight since ev's are so weight sensitive. It does work for the solar racing cars, but the cars would perform a LOT better if they could just plug in instead of carrying the solar panels.

monster said:

i think its proof of concept.

Click to expand...

That's what I thought, but they claim to be taking orders for this bike. I will remain skeptical, though, especially since this company's other products are pillows and cushions.

Kellan

I remember seeing this bike here in a post about 3 years ago. What I remember is that someone pointed out that it must be photoshopped, as the reflections in the wheel are wrong. there should be some curve to the reflections because the covers would be cone shaped.