Nuna
solar car series
Nuna is the name of a series of crewed solar powered race cars that have won the World Solar Challenge in Australia eight times: in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2025. The vehicles are built by students who are part of the "Brunel Solar Team" (formerly Nuon Solar Team and Vattenfall Solar Team) at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, sponsored by Dutch multinational Brunel International (formerly N.V. Nuon Energy).
Nuna
Design criteria
To have a good chance to win, the car has to:
collect as much solar energy as possible
use as little energy as possible to drive at a certain speed. This means special attention to:
the efficiency of transferring electrical energy to the wheels, and
minimizing friction, constituted by:
air friction (air resistance), and
rolling friction, which in turn is affected by the weight, among other things
Solar cells
The solar cells are made of gallium arsenide (GaAs) and consist of three layers. Sunlight that penetrates the upper layer is used in the lower layers, resulting in an efficiency of over 26%. This type of solar cell is among the best available currently. Apart from efficiency, size also matters, so the entire upper surface of the Nuna 3 is covered with them, except for the cockpit.
Efficiency is optimal when the cells are hit by the solar rays perpendicularly. If not, output is reduced by roughly the cosine of the angle with the perpendicular.
A solar cell gives a certain amount of current for a certain amount of sunlight.
The public source identifies “Nuna” as solar car series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nuna, solar and series.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nuna” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.