Numerical Investigation of Drag and Lift Coefficient on a Fixed Tilt Ground Mounted Photovoltaic Module System over Inclined Terrain

摘要

The present study deals with the 2D and 3D steady state Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Strokes (RANS) simulations for the fixed tilt ground mounted photovoltaic (PV) module system by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Here, we are considering shear stress transport k-omega (SST k-ω) turbulence model and the system is supposed to be immersed in atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). Initially the 2D and 3D numerical models are validated with the available experimental results of the literature. The work focuses on the evaluation of drag and lift coefficients on photovoltaic systems mounted over the inclined terrain (hills). Three different profile of hills were considered with height of 100m and ratio of height to length 0.5, 0.75 and 1 respectively over the consecutive seven rows of solar panel array. It is observed that with the increase in stiffness of hill, drag and lift forces increases respectively. So, implementation of solar panels on the stiff hills is not recommended. Also, the influence of panel length, spacing factor between consecutive panels, clearance height from the ground, wind speed and angle of tilt are studied parametrically.