A CFD Study of Wind Loads on High Aspect Ratio Ground-Mounted Solar Panels

摘要

Computational fluid dynamics is used to study the wind loads on a high aspect ratio ground-mounted solar panel. Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations are performed using a commercial finite volume-based code with two different numerical approaches. First, the entire panel is directly simulated in a three-dimensional domain. Then, a small portion of the panel is considered, by imposing periodic boundary conditions in the spanwise homogeneous direction. The comparison shows a good match between the results obtained with the two different models, in terms of pressure coefficient and aerodynamic loads. The main consequence is a considerable reduction of the computational costs when using the reduced model.