Methods to Reduce the Risk to Wind Action of the Fixing Systems of Sollar Collectors

Abstract

The interest in the non-conventional energy resources, a consequence of the severe restrictions imposed towards pollution of any kind, arises again the interest in using solar collectors. Implanting them on the terraces of new or existent home residencies, or any kind of other buildings, means to solve a sum of engineering problems, among them being also the stages of safely designing the plane panels for collectors and the sustaining skeleton, made in steel as well as the fixing systems adopted for the interface with the building itself. The necessity of considering the maximum wind speeds actions along other dynamic effects of its turbulence is the result of a many years experience, specially if one must also think in terms of efficiency and costs both for construction and exploitation. The pattern of the wind flow field suffers intricate alterations in the proximity of these collectors placed in the vicinity of the building surface and, in these situations, it is common to test the models at a reduced scale in wind tunnels with atmospheric boundary layers. The experimental study presented in this paper was undertaken in the Laboratory of Aerodynamics of the Faculty of Construction and Building Services in Iaşi and it reveals the results and the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the wind flow over a row of collectors differently arranged in order to evaluate the wind pressure coefficients used in design.

Keywords

• solar collectors
• wind tunnel
• wind turbulence
• wind pressures