This Master's Thesis project had the objective of optimizing the process of charging electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk batteries using on-board photovoltaic energy with purpose with demostrating its feasibility and usefulness for the market of this vehicles based on daily history of trips. Th that end, we divided the work into three different parts:
The first part involved the incorporation of the solar photovoltaic panels onto the vehicle's roof. In order to do this, the first step was to design supporting structures in order to attach the solar panels together by using two round tubes, holes were drilled to screw the panels to the tubes to the isophonic claim on top on the vehicle. The final product can be seen in figure below.
The second part was to built a data acquisition system in order to collected data during the vehicle movement. In general data were acquired from the three different sensors. Namely, data from the GPS device where contained data of vehicle position and its velocity over time. Data concerning the battery packs were acquired from the Battery Management System (BMS) and data concerning the output of solar photovoltaic panels was collected the Current Meter (PZEM)
In third part , data collected from several environmental conditions were analysed and used to evaluate wether this system yields real improvements in the vehicle's performance. The main outputs obtained from this work can be seen below.