How to Enable Complex Simulations: The Power of Multiphysics & Digital Thread Seminar

Developing a Greener America by Embracing Complexity and Fighting the State-of-the-Art Inertia.

Author: Pierre Lacerte - OPSUN

Abstract

Solar is the fastest growing renewable energy source in the world. This is due mainly to a relative ease of deployment and very high governmental and social incentives. This leads to a big problem where the commercialisation of products and solutions is accomplished way faster than the development of common technical knowledge and regulatory guidelines. Development of technical knowledge requires a very high demand in resources from current controlling stakeholders for which, more often than not, results in a net negative outcome for them.

Now why would we undergo this challenge then? Simply because not all stakeholders benefit from this status quo. For example, end users, insurers and the general sustainability of the solar industry all benefit in the long term from pushing the technical knowledge. As the industry is gaining in maturity, a shift of control is happening towards these stakeholders and regulatory guidelines are starting to emerge.

In this presentation we will take a dive at a very specific optimisation node of a PV installation. We will show the order of magnitude to which FEA is used at Opsun simply to try to capture the general structural response of rooftop PV structures under very complex wind loads. Wind loads are typically affected by: roof geometry, PV structure geometry, local climatic loads, position of PV structure on roofs and many other parameters. Local pressure coefficients are measured in wind tunnels which provide hundreds of relevant load cases to be considered. We will show what simulation data management strategy was implemented to manage the sheer amount (thousands) of simulation units, but also how the results are integrated in other business processes. We will share how we tackle complexity and our simulation data management strategy implementation, what we have done well and what we would do differently.