Detalhes do Documento

Photovoltaic solar panels have many applications and among them are the autonomous solar lighting columns, which has been growing in popularity in urban and rural enviroments. These columns are installed in open regions and have their structure exposed to the mechanical actions imposed by the wind, so they need to be correctly designed to support them. There are aerodynamic variables that must be determined for the design of these columns, especially the drag coefficient, a property linked to the geometry of a body, which represents its interaction with a flowing fluid. Due to the complexity of determining these variables, experimental methods are constantly used to obtain these values. Classically, wind tunnel simulations are used for this purpose, but they can be expensive and difficult to perform, so that fluid computational analysis has been widely applied to replace physical analysis. In this work, the drag coefficient of an autonomous solar illumination column is determined by wind tunnel simulations and computational analysis using various body positions in relation to the direction of flow. The drag coefficient determined using wind tunnel simulations varies between 0.65 and 0.80 while for computational methods it varies between 0.43 and 0.73. With the obtained results it is possible to perform a verification of the fidelity of the data obtained by computational means when compared to those obtained through the wind tunnel simulations obtaining an average error of 9.2% and 27.2% for the computational methods used.