2 months ago, Segun Oyeyiola, a final year engineering student at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-ife achieved success in turning a Volkswagen Beetle into a wind and solar-powered car, partly from free scrap parts donated by friends and family. Everything other part cost under a million naira. The Wind and Solar powered car also comes with a GPS app that monitors the car’s health.
Oyeyiola installed a huge solar panel on top of the Beetle; and put in a wind turbine under the hood to allow flow of air into grill while the car is in motion, rotating the turbine’s rotors and charging the battery at the back of the car. Oyeyiola also built a strong suspension system to deal with the weight of the battery itself.
While the car is not perfect yet, the battery taking at least four to five hours to charge, innovative Oyeyiola says he will “keep improving on it, until it becomes Nigeria’s future car”.
He will probably be doing that soon after his final examinations, which happen to be today.
Meanwhile, National Agency for Science Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) is now in partnership with Federal Government of Nigeria for the localproduction of solar panels to compliment and grow renewable energy resources utilization and deployment in Nigeria.
Source: Fast CoExist
