COMPARISON OF WIND TUNNEL TESTING AND CFD WIND LOAD RESULTS FOR A CPV TRACKER

摘要

Wind loads must be taken into account for the design of any outdoor structure. For solar trackers, the analysis of the wind loads presents a number of challenges as the existing, officially released tracker standards do not provide sufficient guidelines regarding how wind loads should be calculated and which assumptions should be applied. Building standards such as the Eurocode or US Building Code do not relate specifically to solar trackers and could result in overdesign. The IEC 62817 (Design Qualification For Solar Trackers) is in the final draft stage and addresses the issue of determining the winds loads on solar trackers. Three methods are described: wind tunnel analysis, CFD analysis, and an equation based calculation. This paper provides a comparison of the wind load results obtained using the IEC 62817 draft, wind tunnel tests and CFD analyses.