Estimation of Wind Load on Floating Solar Array

Abstract Floating solar technology is exponentially scaling up worldwide. Floating solar projects (under different phases: commissioned, under execution, tendering) have now reached more than 10 GW globally in the last few years. Research interest among the researchers is also growing rapidly. Application of FSPV started with the installation of 0–5 MWp FSPV farm on small lakes or artificial man-made reservoirs with benign wave conditions; however, the same has now reached installation of 500–1000 MWp FSPV farm (FIGURE 1) on large dam reservoirs with harsh wave condition. With the increasing installation scale, design complexity increases due to larger and natural water bodies with highly undulated reservoir beds, increasing fetch causing higher wave height, current speed and wind-induced load. Hence, correct estimation of the wind, wave and current-induced loads on floating arrays is essential for designing FSPV farms. Also, as witnessed in the past in the case of Kyocera’s 13.7 MW FSPV project at Yamakura Dam, incorrect estimation of these loads may cause catastrophic failures of FPVs. The present study focuses on estimating the wind load on a floating solar array numerically using the steady-state RANS-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. In the literature, few studies have presented the approximate analytical method [19] to evaluate the wind loads on floating solar arrays. The More appropriate approach to estimate the wind load is to perform a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study of the entire structure in any finite volume-based solver such as Ansys Fluent, which is a time-consuming analysis as the size of the object under consideration becomes larger due to millions of mesh counts involved in a bigger structure. While the floating PV array size becomes larger, the computational cost increases exponentially. For utility-scale projects such as the 7MW PV array, it may take months to provide the CFD result, depending upon the computational power. Hence, either simplified 3D models or analytical methods have been used in the past to get loads of such arrays. Both of these cases need to be supported with a more detailed CFD study. For the present study, eight numbers of HDPE floater-mounted panels are considered in one column for the CFD study. The panel inclination angle is kept at 5°. Five such columns are modelled to analyze the interference or shielding effect. Different configurations are modelled in NX and then imported in Ansys space claim. The 3D model is then used in Ansys Fluent for computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation.