Analysis of mechanical stress and structural deformation on a solar photovoltaic panel through various wind loads

Solar photovoltaic structures are affected by many kinds of loads such as static loads and wind loads. Static loads takes place when physical loads like weight or force put into it but wind loads occurs when severe wind force like hurricanes or typhoons drift around the PV panel. Proper controlling of aerodynamic behavior ensures correct functioning of the solar panel. Due to extreme pressure, delamination of interfaces happens inside the photovoltaic panel. As delamination is caused due to stress, therefore it has becomes an essential task to determine the magnitude of these stress inside the panel. In this study, single solar panel array has been subjected to a wind speed which is varying from 10 to 260 km/h, to look after the pressure effect inside the array. 3D Reynolds- averaged Navier Stokes algorithm with a wobbly solver, using a steady inlet condition has been used to examine the wind pressure through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach by applying the turbulence model called shear stress transport (SST) k–ω model. The simulation has been carried out by fixing the inclination angle of the panel at 25° through ANSYS Fluent software. The maximum stress which has been found here is 4196.4 Pa at 260 km/h wind speed when the maximum structural deformation has also been noticed. The proposed work will be very much helpful to the designers to get an overview of stress, strain and structural deformation characteristics in photovoltaic industry.