Computational application to study the performance of an electric vehicle with photovoltaic panels

The installation of micro generation systems on-board of electric vehicles is a solution that can contribute to improve the performance of this type of vehicles. Embedded generation systems increase the autonomy of electric vehicles and can reduce the number of times and duration of the recharging process of their energy storage systems. In this work, the influence of installing micro-generation systems dedicated to electrical vehicles is investigated. In particular, the integration of photovoltaic modules in a commercial electric vehicle (“Fiat Seicento Elettra”) was analyzed. Starting from this solution, a computational application was developed allowing the users/students to configure the vehicle (including: type of vehicle, slope of the route, type of photovoltaic panels, location and month of the year). Therefore, the main outputs of the developed computational application are the distance run according to the energy generated by the photovoltaic modules, the power balance of the photovoltaic panels, the greenhouse gas emissions and the vehicle consumptions for urban, extra urban and combined circuits.