Week 5 - Solid Truss design, calculations for 2000 m track with PVsyst, PVsol and SAM.

This week I contributed to the team by calculating the production of a solar system. The system was from SJSU main campus to the SJSU stadium. It was 2000m long and had 4 panels per roughly one meter. I first did an initial calculation on the website PVWatts here: PVWatts and the results are here: Click Here. The hand calculation for came out to about 10,960 kwh/day. This was close my other teammate's calculations and we decided the differences were purely based on design inputs. I also did these same calculations with SAM software and got around 8000 kwh/day that the system produces. There were some issues I found that the commercial software's PVsyst and PVsol produced far less as shown here in Mwh/yr: Click Here. I could not figure out if this is due to the commercial software being more accurate or if there was something missing in my inputs. More research needs to be done in this area to be sure of the calculations and the accuracy they give. In this case, the system is so huge, any small detail can cause it to shift significantly. In addition, I also designed a truss structure for our system that solid and able to withstand more weight in the files here: Click Here.

Figure 1. Solid Truss Structure Design.

Figure 2. Hand calc's PVWatts.

Figure 3. SAM results. 

Figure 4. PVsol results. 

Figure 5. PVsyst results.