Electrical model of a solar car system using SIMULINK

Abstract

A feasible alternative source of renewable energy is solar power technology. Considering the crucial hindrances in developing and implementing the system solar powered car, the necessity of a simulation tools comes in front. For this reason a simulation tool having the options to model and analyze the characteristics of different electronic and mechanical components i.e. a solar panel, a battery and a DC motor should have been developed. Moreover, it is capable of combining different components with control algorithms to examine and evaluate the performance of the whole system in different ambient conditions. In this paper, the demonstration to develop a dynamic model of a solar car in SIMULINK is explained including the approaches to develop the model of different components from scratch and how to use it to test and verify the behavior of them. SIMULINK is a graphical programing language tool for modeling and simulation highly integrated with MATLAB which makes the mathematical operations and plotting the graphs easiest ever. The dynamicity of the model offers the user to change the parameters of every components and environment to fit their purpose. The scope of the article extends to combination of all components of the solar car to test overall system at diverse car velocity for any single day of the year.