solarEbike said:
That's a sweet ride. My sincerest condolences on your loss. Rest in peace, Bionx.
No big deal. I have enough BionX hardware to last for the next 15-20 years and also the sweet BionX Development software
It's quite complicated to build a street legal speed-Pedelec over here, there are not so many options.
I'm all for saving weight in my everyday Pedelecs and bicycles, because low weight make them nice and easy to handle and carry. Often I do carry them the steps 4 stores up to my flat, sometimes wearing a suit.
with a solar powered bike low weight is beneficial of course, but handling is shitty anyway. I personally are planing more into a foldable solar generator (my moduls are 55cm x 60cm each) and I was thinking abot adding shoulder straps and a load carry system on the trailer, so it could be possible to carry the solar trailer incl. luggage for small distances on your back.
There could also be the possibility to add a Packraft to the system. Mines weights around 4kg and can carry 250kg
So with all the extra stuff to carry around (battery and motor around 8lg, solar panels + charger around 10-15kg, trailer around 8kg) there needs to be a significant benefit over riding just a normal bicycle.
I assume travaling at 30km/h air resistance becomes a much more important consideration compared to travaling around 15km/h average.
When looking at the suntrip vehicles I wonder to see so little optimizing of air resistance. Just look how some people mount their luggage. You can just see the wasted watts in drag.
The hotspots in your infrared camera shots are consistent with my experience buying at least 5 different semi-flex panels from eBay, Amazon and AliExpress over the years. They were mostly junk. Solbian in Italy makes a high quality flex panel with genuine SunPower cells. Here's an article they wrote on testing their product against competitors. Normally, I would be wary of a company publishing in-house test results with such small sample sizes and no third party validation but in this case they're consistent with my own experience. https://www.solbian.eu/en/blog/testing-competitors-surprises-n195
Thnaks for the link. I already did know the site because it is one of very rare ones with IR pictures of flexibe panels showing the microcracks. I'm super interested in that topic, but sadly nobody at the Suntrip seems to do some IR thermal or luminescens pictures of the modules before and after the trip.
I bet you could learn a LOT with such pictures and it is not expensive to make them.
The Solbian moduls are quite expensive. Afair I paied 180 Euro for one 50W panels (payed for 4 of them and got 2 refunds because of cracked cells). I bought modules with ETFE front cover (no reflections) and black fibreglass backside. I thought this is a better idea for stealth camping not having the withe moduls.
But maybe using a white aluminum backside would have been the better idea, not that a plan those aluminium backside which imho is much better than my first idea with 10mm Polycarbonate.
Using thermal insulation on the backside of your modules will increase Delta T by almost factor 2. So if the standard module will get up to 70°C with 30°C air temperature, with a thermal insulation on the back you would almost hit 110°C under such conditions. And this is average temperature and not hot spots. Imho this is to hot and will degrade the cells and materials used quickly.
This is way I believe aluminium is a better idea.
PS: Your sun tracking solar bicycle trailer is VERY cool! If you tilt the generator how does it handle side winds?