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

Currently, the photovoltaic 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 photovoltaic 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 behaviour of photovoltaic panels is important and necessary. In this paper classical lamination theory (CLT) considering soft interlayer is applied to build governing equations of the panel. A Rayleigh-Rita method is modified to solve the governing equations and calculate the static deformation and inter force of the photovoltaic panel. Different from many previous researches only analysing 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 photovoltaic panels are completed. Comparing the numerical results with experiment results, the accuracy of the analytical solutions are verified. The influence of boundary condition is shown by comparing the results with previous researches, and a guide for the photovoltaic panel installation is finally proposed based on those conclusions.

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