ESTUDIO COMPUTACIONAL DEL FACTOR DE OCULTAMIENTO AERODINÁMICO ENTRE PAÑOS DE PANELES PARA LA OPTIMIZACIÓN DE ESTRUCTURAS SOPORTE EN PARQUES SOLARES

Abstract

The heuristic design process presently followed for the project of support structures in photovoltaic plants is driven primarily by cost reduction, devoting the greater efforts to optimize geometric shapes or production and logistics processes. Another synergic possibility to address the issue -although not exploited in practice- is to assess more precisely the wind loads on these structures, taking into account the particularities of each specific facility. Current standards and recommendations do not allow considering the hiding between successive arrays or tables of panels, either because they behave altogether like a disconnected roof or because they are comparable to a sequence of sloping walls with holes in the bottom. In this paper, numerical simulation and parallel computing techniques typical of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are used to characterize the effect that the aerodynamic hiding between tables has in the total loads on the support structures of photovoltaic panels. The results show a significant reduction of wind loads in most of the tables of the solar park, allowing to suggest a potential decrease in the construction cost of the plant.