Students build solar charging station for electric cars

A little over two weeks ago, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) announced a team of engineering students developed a station solar charging for electric cars. Actually, it was developed for the project gemAn electric car used by the university’s planning, sustainability and project management office.

Three mechanical engineering students and one biomedical engineering student created a 300-watt solar panel charging station that can fully charge. Normally the car continues to charge overnight, according to the university.

“We implemented a 300-watt solar panel to charge Gemma off-grid. The solar panel charges a battery used to charge Gemma at night. Mechanical engineering student involved in the project, Joe Downie, said in a statement released by the institution. He said his station implements manual sun tracking and has 12 settings each month to tend to be more efficient.

The vehicle is also used to make food deliveries for the Food Recovery Network (FRN), a UIC waste prevention food project that distributes food to homeless people – basically, they take back food that would otherwise be thrown away and donate it to communal shelters.

charging station

Development of the charging station began in 2020, but the project was interrupted after the university stopped due to the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Fortunately, students continued to work from home.

The team also plans to bring the tech to a trailer and offer a mobile charging station – in fact, that was the goal from the very beginning. “We waited three months for a trailer we wanted to arrive. “We canceled the order and moved to a fixed system,” Downie said.

The innovation was developed for Engineers for a Sustainable World, a project by the engineering faculty of UIC founded in 2020 to create sustainable technologies.