Solar panels to make your car eco sustainable. This is the goal for HySolarKit.
Prof Gianfranco Rizzo from Salerno Industrial Engineering University, with his team, designed a solar hybrid panels kit to be applied on your car in order to reduce oil consumption and improve performance thanks to a product to sell after-market to be installed at the end of the production line.
eProlnn, a Salerno Univeristy spin off, supported by Enea and Enterprise Europe Network, is in charge of the project. Basically: HySolarKith converts your car into a green and hi tech vehicle, cutting off fuel consumption and emissions at a reasonable budget. Gianfranco Rizzo explained to Sole 24 Ore that the goal of the project is to transform conventional vehicles in ecological cars with a limited budget. The main difference with the modern electrical car is that you can avoid the electric battery and energy consumption to recharge it: with solar panels the car is recharged while using brakes and the battery recharges under the sun. You will keep all the advantages and range of your car.
The kit of equipments, to be installed for converting a conventional car into a hybrid solar vehicle, will include:
- A couple of in-wheel motors, which can be purchased (they are currently commercialized by Michelin and other manufacturers) and eventually modified according to system requirements.
- An auxiliary battery pack, presumably consisting of Lithium-Ion cells.
- An additional control system (VMU), which is conceived to be self-adaptive enough to be suitable for different vehicle and in-wheel typologies and features.
- A connector for the OBD gate along with related cables, to be connected to the VMU.
- Either a flexible or semi-rigid solar panel, to be installed on vehicle roof.
- Possibly, a small additional display to be placed on car instrument panel, which could include a state of charge indicator for the auxiliary battery along with additional control buttons to switch from one operating mode to another .
HySolarKith is one of the first companies from the South of Italy to benefit from Horizon 2020, a financial Pmi program. Now they are through a ‘Phase Two’ session in partnership with italian companies such as Actua, Landi Renzo, Solbian and Cecomp. In the meanwhile, Rizzo’s team is ready to apply for an Equity CrowdFunding to let investors buy startup shares. Enough said that the project met the interest in Malta and China investors.
This is the project timeline: http://www.hysolarkit.com/timeline_EN.php
