Experimental and theoretical research on bending behavior of photovoltaic panels with a special boundary condition

Abstract

Currently, the photovoltaic (PV) panels widely manufactured on market are composed of stiff front and back layers and the solar cells embedded in a soft polymeric interlayer. The wind and snow pressure are the usual loads to which working PV panels need to face, and it needs the panels keep undamaged under those pressure when they generate electricity. Therefore, an accurate and systematic research on bending behavior of PV panels is important and necessary. In this paper, classical lamination theory (CLT) considering soft interlayer is applied to build governing equations of the solar panel. A Rayleigh–Rita method is modified to solve the governing equations and calculate the static deformation of the PV panel. Different from many previous researches only analyzing simply supported boundary condition for four edges, a special boundary condition which consists of two opposite edges simply supported and the others two free is studied in this paper. A closed form solution is derived out and used to do the numerical calculation. The corresponding bending experiments of PV panels are completed. Comparing the numerical results with experiment results, the accuracy of the analytical solutions are verified.