The multi tracker is made to hold one of my 250V pack charger panels, and could sit on the roof of my insight and pump in 85MA while following the sun.
uhtrinity, when I read his article on his site he said he could fit 3 sets and they could parallel to 255mAh. 25 hours to charge 6.5Ah from dead if that were the case but C/20 is a safe constant trickle rate for when the pack is fully charged and the sun is out.
Will it pay off? Depends on the acquisition cost of the cells. Then again, many people do everything they can to reduce their environmental impact and the price they pay doesn't matter as much as the fun they have doing it and an impact(even if relatively small) is made.
Mike, thats a great page, but what I found there that I was most interested in, was not the tracker, but the EV truck.
Back in 1972 I built a Hybrid using an MGA roadster, a 400 amp military generator/motor exactly like yours, and 3 @ 12V batteries. For the gas driven part I used an 8hp B&S and a 200 amp military generator/motor. This charged the batts and was triggered on by a voltage sensor and was started from the batteries it was charging. It got 60 mpg.
Last year I wanted to resurect the project and since I had saved the electronics/motors/etc. when I sold the MGA years ago I was going to build it all into my VW based 1936 Jaguar SS-100 Kit car that is languishing away in my garage.
But it was about that time that I learned of the Honda Insight and after buying one I dropped the "Return of Godzilla" project. After all, it was only capable of 60 MPG...#
However, recently I decided to revive the project, but this time make it a plug in EV only, no gas engine. As I say I still have the 400 amp motor and I have a WV tranny to J. Hinze motor adapter on the way to me right now from an EV car builder. I think I will sell the VW motor...its an antique... But "back in the day" as they say, I used a home brew "chopper" made from a 12V fan motor for speed control, a la Mother Earth News. That, however, is crude and it needs to be modernized.
You don't go into any detail on the controller you use. Could you give me more details on the controller circuit and specs?
Since that would be off this thread, use my email address if you have the time....<Jim.Isbell@Gmail.com>
__________________
Jim Isbell
2000, 5 speed, 250,000 miles
"If you are not living on the edge, well then,
you are just taking up too much space."
uhtrinity, when I read his article on his site he said he could fit 3 sets and they could parallel to 255mAh. 25 hours to charge 6.5Ah from dead if that were the case but C/20 is a safe constant trickle rate for when the pack is fully charged and the sun is out.
But the sun wont be out for 25 hours.....at least where I live......so we are looking at 3 @ 8 hour cycles or 72 hours!!!! You will be lucky to get 8 hours of charge as the reduction in power at either end because of the atmospheric attenuation really limits you to 4 to 6 hours at full power in the lower latitudes.
Where the sun IS out for 25 hours the atmospheric attenuation is horrific...
__________________
Jim Isbell
2000, 5 speed, 250,000 miles
"If you are not living on the edge, well then,
you are just taking up too much space."
That solar concentrator made I gather from an old radar dish is quite possibly the single most impressive power tool I have ever seen.
With naturally supplied free energy it can do anything from burning wood to grilling burgers to getting pressure cookers to help with tomato canning. Oh, my, I am impressed.
I have an old DirectTV dish I was going to use as a high-gain WiFi antenna, never got around to it... With some aluminum foil taped to the dish, it easily melted a black plastic lid. It could easily be made to auto-track the sun... grilling next summer might very easily be a whole different animal... :> (I'll probably also use little adhesive-mounted mirrors for real efficiency so it doesn't take forever.)
As uhtrinity said, 85MA is not much to speak of, which is why I use three of them when solar charging a pack. I just lay one on the hood, one on the roof, and one on the hatch. On the panel cost, three of the 250VDC panels can be built from one box of the cells, which gives you 170 cells for about a buck a cell.
The real motivation for the trackers is not so much to charge the car, but to be a part of a sustainable energy road show that a friend and I are working on.
We will bring the show to local schools and events to increase young peoples awareness of sustainable energy, and nothing attracts more interest than a high speed solar tracker that can melt things.
The square frame makes attaching a whole range of solar devices easy.
I will be finishing a 32" parabolic dish tracking system today.
Now that my shop is getting sorted, and I have some space to work, I will be trying to finish up some of the many projects that have been sitting for too long.
I will start the re write of MIMA software once the weather starts to get colder and working outdoors is more difficult.
The EV telephone truck has been working for me all summer. I can use it pretty much for a whole day of work and still have 70-80% SOC on the batteries.
I bumped the truck voltage to 48V so I can use the truck as a back up power system on wheels when I add a 48V inverter. The controller is a curtis that I picked up at the MIT swap meet last year.
To many projects not enough time or money.
The pictures dont have enough resolution to read anything but ALTRAX. What is the model number? Do you know if it is a currently available model? And is there a source on your site for the schematic of the trucks power system? It would be a real big time saver for me not to have to reinvent the wheel.
__________________
Jim Isbell
2000, 5 speed, 250,000 miles
"If you are not living on the edge, well then,
you are just taking up too much space."
I looked through the page for your wind project. What have you done to limit the speed so that the blade tip speed doesn't reach a destructive level. Typically production wind generators will short themselves if they go to fast or furl out of the way of the wind to slow down.
If things get spinning to fast, serious injury or damage can occur when a blade flies off or shatters and hits property or people.
This one failed to stop, not a common occurance with large scale windgens but with homemade wind generators things like this are much more common. YouTube - Wind Turbine Explodes!
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Tracking solar pack charger
