APPLICATION OF ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM IN HYBRID AUTOMOBILES

Abstract

This paper presents the concept of hybrid automobile using energy harvesting system. In this work solar energy, wind energy, ambient noise and suspension energy harvesting systems have been used. The system hardware prototype has been made and its efficiency has been calculated. The proposed system can prove to be a trend changing and very efficient in this time of depleting non renewable resources. As the non renewable energy sources are depleting, a need of using renewable energy sources as primary fuel source is being felt. The device which uses the renewable energy sources like solar and wind; and manmade sources like noise, speed breakers etc; to generate and store energy is known as energy harvesting systems(EHS). Tremendous work is going on EHS. EHS has got vast applications ranging from wearable devices to automobiles. The EHS can be of two types simple EHS and hybrid EHS. Simple EHS uses only one energy source while hybrid EHS uses multiple methods of energy source like combination of Solar and ambient temperature harvester to power devices in the area where sunlight is in abundance. The various renewable energy sources are: Solar, Wind and Water. Manmade energy source are like Thermal Noise, RF noise, suspension system. The combination of the energy sources can be used based on the type of geography of the application device. For example, in Africa, solar energy is in abundance; coastal area can use tidal energy source; chakarwaat area can use wind energy for power generation; the metropolitan cities can make best use of the RF noise created by the towers and noise created by vehicular traffic whereas the non planar areas where there are a lot of speed breakers, suspensions can be used as a good energy harvesting approach. In our proposed system solar, ambient noise, wind and suspension sources are used as four parameters to generate the energy for the automobile battery charging application.