Wind Loads on Low Profile Tilted Solar Arrays Placed on Low-Rise Building Roofs

Wind loads on large, low-profile, roof-mounted solar arrays placed on low-rise building roofs were examined using scale models in a boundary layer wind tunnel. The effects of building size and array tilt angle were examined. It was found that wind loads on the array increase with building size. Normalizing the array effective wind area by the building wall size leads to design curves that collapse onto a single curve for each array geometry. For tilt angles below 10°, there is a linear increase in the pressure coefficients as tilt angle is increased. For arrays with tilt angle of 10o and above, the wind loads do not depend on tilt angle and are relatively constant.