Simulation and design of a photovoltaic roof for automotive applications

This paper presents a software tool that has been developed to model, investigate and simulate the behavior of a photovoltaic generator to be installed on a generic non-planar surface. The innovative aspect of the tool is the possibility to consider any kind of surfaces, also curved and moving ones. The tool has been developed in the Matlab environment and allows the user to analyze any kind of surface simply starting from a CAD file. The tool is very versatile and can be used to analyze the possibility to exploit various available surfaces in order to produce photovoltaic energy in many different applications. As a practical example, the case of using solar cells on the roof of a car has been considered. Results of the simulations are provided in the paper.

[1]  F.Z. Peng,et al.  Analytical Model for a Photovoltaic Module using the Electrical Characteristics provided by the Manufacturer Data Sheet , 2005, 2005 IEEE 36th Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[2]  E.J. Simburger,et al.  PV Prius; 8: Terrestrial PV Systems 8.1 Stand Alone Systems, Including Hybrid Systems , 2006, 2006 IEEE 4th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conference.

[3]  J. A. Gow,et al.  Development of a photovoltaic array model for use in power-electronics simulation studies , 1999 .

[4]  Tom Denton,et al.  Automobile Electrical And Electronic Systems , 1995 .

[5]  R.C. Campbell.  A Circuit-based Photovoltaic Array Model for Power System Studies , 2007, 2007 39th North American Power Symposium.

[6]  Amulya Karavadi,et al.  Novel non-flat photovoltaic module geometries and implications to power conversion , 2011, 2011 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition.

[7]  J. Plastow.  Progress in Building Integrated PV Technologies , 2006, 2006 IEEE 4th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conference.

[8]  M. Turner,et al.  Nanoparticle-polymer photovoltaic cells. , 2008, Advances in colloid and interface science.

[9]  Michael Grätzel,et al.  Solar energy conversion by dye-sensitized photovoltaic cells. , 2005, Inorganic chemistry.