Solar energy has seen a continuous expansion of use but it creates in users a growing conviction that its seasonality, weak intensity and weak availability are limiting factors of their use.
This project aims to bring together diverse areas of expertise in engineering in the design and conception of vehicles. The exploitation of solar energy requires overcoming some existing constraints in the design of vehicles and creates an opportunity for integration of various types of knowledge in diverse fields, from energy to power through materials, and robotics.
Paradoxically, these constraints pose new challenges in various fields of engineering. It may be said that solar energy is a deja-vu of the early industrial era, when the machine of choice was the steam engine with a very high ratio weight/power. By using the machine as locomotor element, limited in slopes and speeds up to win, dictated the election of the railways as preferred mode of transportation for some decades.
One of the aims is to create a motored composition with a capacity of 24 passengers, equipped with batteries with a range of about 50km and a set of photovoltaic panels with 3 kWp power.
The primary application is to use this vehicle for the carriage of passengers in touristic sea areas, preferably between urban centers and beaches. Examples of these trains are already in Portugal, as Transpraia Costa da Caparica and beach of Barril (Algarve) both with a diesel motor. His conversion to solar energy will associate the benefit of alternative energies to protect the fragile ecosystem at the fringes.