The Pure Tension Pavilion — a collapsible solar EV charging pavilion, and the winner of the 2013 Switch to Pure Volvo Pavilion Design competition — will be displayed later this year in Rome during the launch of Volvo’s V60 Plug-in Hybrid Electric Diesel model, as per a recent announcement from Volvo.
The Pure Tension Solar Pavilion when deployed.
Image Credit: SDA
The collapsible solar charging station certainly looks interesting, and is compact enough to fit into the car’s trunk when condensed down. The solar charging station is the product of a contest designed to “re-envision” the standard pavilions typically used for trade shows, provide shelter, have a beautiful design, and be a power source.
The pavilion has been described by Volvo as a vision of the future where cars can simply charge themselves by deploying structures such as this — while that may or may not be the case, the current design is unlikely to enter wide-scale use as it is. Though it certainly is interesting to look at, and there are probably a number of situations where it could prove useful, it’s not very practical for normal use. Simply putting solar panels on your roof and charging your car from your conventional electrical outlets makes much more sense and would be much more efficient.
As far as construction goes, the Pure Tension Pavilion is essentially just a tensioned membrane structure, composed of an HDPE mesh skin, a carbon fiber skeleton, and integrated with embedded photovoltaic panels. The appeal of the design is of course its ability to fully collapse and fit within the trunk of Volvo’s V60 Plug-in Hybrid Electric Diesel model when not in use.
The press release from Synthesis Design + Architecture — one of the designers along with Buro Happold, and Fabric Images — continues:
The issue of sustainability is addressed in the form of a power strategy which uses fabric embedded Photovoltaic panels and light collected from the sun or indoor artificial lighting to power the pavilion and charge the V60 model on show. The car will ‘plug’ directly into the pavilion’s skin, charging its battery with the energy collected over the day. The ‘Switch to Pure Volvo” pavilion becomes a symbol of the V60’s attitude to efficient energy consumption and a showcase of the Hybrid V60’s characteristics. [sic]
As TreeHugger notes: “While the Pure Tension solar pavilion is an experimental creation, and isn’t market-ready at all, if it turns out to be a functional and efficient product, it could serve to demonstrate another possible iteration of methods to provide some of the power to electric cars.”
While the idea certainly wouldn’t be ideal for everyday uses — and perhaps many readers will find the idea as a whole impractical — there are a variety of niche uses that this design would likely work quite well for. In particular, something similar to this could potentially work very well as a power backup for those off-roading, especially in remote and sunny regions — regions that are currently not very practical to travel through with most types of electric vehicles. Or perhaps even just for camping?
Any thoughts on the pavilion from our readers?
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