Session: 09-04-04: Floating Solar Energy

Paper Number: 103443

103443 - Hydrodynamic Analysis of Pontoon-Type Floating Photovoltaic Based on Frequency-Domain Model 

Solar energy plays a significant role in the clean energy transition. Photo-
voltaic has been widely used to convert solar energy into electric energy. How-
ever,the majority of the photovoltaic plants are land based which require a lot of
space. To save the land resource, the inland-water based photovoltaic becomes
popular and the floating photovoltaic (FPV) has attracted much attention by
the solar power community. While the FPV rapidly developed in the freshwa-
ter, the FPV technology has not expanded to the marine environment yet. The
key challenges come from the harsh metocean conditions. Particularly, the wave
loads becomes one of the major considerations in the design. A typical FPV
structure is a flexible design consists of thousands of interconnected floating
units, which introduces a great number of degrees of freedom. This distinguish-
ing feature makes hydrodynamic analysis of FPV becomes difficult, due to the
interconnection and the strong hydrodynamic interaction between the floating
units. To our best knowledge, there is few publication regarding to the hydro-
dynamics of FPV. This paper aims to develop a hydrodynamic model for FPV
and investigate the response behaviours of FPV in waves.
In this work, frequency-domain model is used to study the hydrodynamic
response of a pontoon-type FPV array. The boundary element method open-
source code Capytaine is used to solve the scattering and radiation problem.
Thanks to the symmetry of the FPV plants array, Hierarchical Toeplitz Matrix
is used to reduce the computational cost. The structure is simplified as a thin
plate and divided into an sub-plate array. To carry out analysis, the sub-plates
are connected through their gravity center.The plate bending force is expressed
in the form of a stiffness matrix. The motion response define at the gravity
center of the each FPV is solved by the multi-body hydrodynamic equations.
The deformation of the array of FPV are determined from the stiffness matrix
equations. This method will effectively evaluate array of FPV hydrodynamic
performance. We expect the study can deepen our understanding of FPV re-
sponse in waves.
 

 

 

Presenting Author: Yongkang Shi Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Presenting Author Biography: Yongkang Shi is a PhD candidate in the State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
I come from China. My research interests are floating photovoltaic hydrodynamics. Very curious, I am passionate about science and technology. I am always looking for initiatives to promote research and make it more accessible.

Authors:

Yongkang Shi Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Yanji Wei Eastern Institute for Advanced Study
Zuogang Chen Shanghai Jiao Tong University