From Landscape Architecture to Transportation
In a departure from what I am doing in mold-making from landscape architecture to transportation, vis a vis, automotive body styling, I find myself distracted to a simple engineering problem as it pertains to increasing the amount of surface area an electric-powered vehicle can collect.
It's not something strange to me. One of the first few things I was interested in drawing as a child were Funny Cars, or dragsters. It has always been in the back of many a young man's mind brought to the fore by desires of freedom, adventure and power in having an automobile.
So I was drawn to what, a bus?
It just seemed to me the first jumping off point to experiment with in adding two more sides of a triangle submerged beneath a transparent skin. I started with incorporation, or absorption of two feet of interior space of a travel tour-like bus.
Here's what I came up with:
The average usable surface area that I came up with, with none of this submerged panel incorporation was about 774 square feet. Adding up all the extra panels produced 2154 square feet, a factor of 1 : 2.75, or a 60 % increase.
I'm not sure whether or not all the panels have to be angled perpendicularly to the sun all the time in this case. One doesn't have to point a solar-cell powered calculator towards the sun to make it work, though I know the power demand between the two is much different.
The principle of doubling the surface are is what I am looking into at first. With today's technology one could even conceivably imitate windows with a small camera and a giant LCD screen. I'm also envisioning simple reflective mirrors place upon the sides of highways to assist such vehicle transport that might even change angles with the rotation of the Earth for the best photovoltaic effect.
It's not something strange to me. One of the first few things I was interested in drawing as a child were Funny Cars, or dragsters. It has always been in the back of many a young man's mind brought to the fore by desires of freedom, adventure and power in having an automobile.
So I was drawn to what, a bus?
It just seemed to me the first jumping off point to experiment with in adding two more sides of a triangle submerged beneath a transparent skin. I started with incorporation, or absorption of two feet of interior space of a travel tour-like bus.
Here's what I came up with:
The average usable surface area that I came up with, with none of this submerged panel incorporation was about 774 square feet. Adding up all the extra panels produced 2154 square feet, a factor of 1 : 2.75, or a 60 % increase.
I'm not sure whether or not all the panels have to be angled perpendicularly to the sun all the time in this case. One doesn't have to point a solar-cell powered calculator towards the sun to make it work, though I know the power demand between the two is much different.
The principle of doubling the surface are is what I am looking into at first. With today's technology one could even conceivably imitate windows with a small camera and a giant LCD screen. I'm also envisioning simple reflective mirrors place upon the sides of highways to assist such vehicle transport that might even change angles with the rotation of the Earth for the best photovoltaic effect.
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