Lizard electric vehicles set to change the world
Batteries may hold the key for electric technology in the medium term, but the answer for our long-term future may well lie in vehicles which are completely independent of any form of exterior power source – except the sun. And they are known as called lizard electric vehicles.
“Energy independent electric vehicles (EIVs) perform their tasks without refuelling or plugging in. These do not even use the new contactless charging. They have equipment on board that turns ambient energy such as sun, wind and waves into sufficient electricity for traction, often with some left over for hotel facilities needed by humans on-board, says Raghu Das, CEO of emerging technology analysts IDTechEx.
“Then there are the needs for electricity for external lights and power for the rapidly increasing amount and complexity of electronics used in telematics, sensing systems, better, safer battery management systems and so on.
“The connected vehicle and the autonomous vehicle also need extra power for electronics yet sometimes this can still be sourced from energy harvesting.
“Providing all that electricity seems extreme enough, but solar racers have already led to the street legal Sunswift eVe in Australia. Solar planes have resulted in ones circumnavigating the world. Planes and airships staying aloft for five to10 years are imminent.”
One of the technologies that will play an increasingly important part in renewing a car’s energy is regenerative energy harvesting.
“This hugely increases efficiency, and there is much
The minimalist approach is already spawning a sub sector of EIVs that IDTechEx calls lizard electric vehicles, because they wake up with the availability of the ambient energy such as the sun coming up.
“This is a more powerful idea that it first seems to be because the abandonment of energy storage saves weight and space, meaning the vehicle can be smaller and therefore go further and for more of the day. Most are autonomous, saving on power for hotel facilities and space and equipment weight for people,” adds Raghu.
Add o this the use of the next generations of photovoltaics, regenerative harvesting inside the vehicle, extreme lightweighting, and unprecedentedly efficient power trains – some solar racers have motors with 97 percent efficiency – and IDTechEx chairman Dr Peter Harrop enthuses: “There is a fabulous roadmap of new technology to be added, and much of it applied to lizard electric vehicles. A Fresnel lens film on ultra-thin singlecrystal silicon will take efficiency to 44 percent using Sumitomo Electric technology.”
“Carboline of Kharkiv in the Ukraine has ultra-lightweight carbon fibre honeycomb with a multiple V shaped surface structure covered in aluminium foil that directs the sun, even at low angles, to the amorphous silicon photovoltaics in the lower layer,” says Raghu.
“It is built from a unique nonwoven bi-axial textile already in use in multiaxial preforms in unmanned aerial systems. Engineer and owner of Carboline, Volodymyr Gavrylko proudly pointed out to IDTechEx that the whole structural member made in this way, such as the wing of a plane, is only 850 grams per square metre”
“On top of all that, if current research programmes are successful, we shall even see structural supercapacitors in lizard electric vehicles that enable them to work for even longer hours thanks to energy storage that adds virtually no weight because it replaces a structural component – the load-bearing bodywork.”
Peter Harrop points to the NFH-H microbus from China that you can buy today. It uses “United Nations Global Blue Sky Award Winning NanoWin CIGS thin film solar modules”.