Dynamic response characteristics of heliostat under hail impacting in Tibetan Plateau of China

Abstract

Heliostats are prone to be destroyed under the action of thunderstorm and hail in the wild. Many studies on heliostat mainly focused on the effect of wind load, while it is a lack of in-depth understanding on the dynamic responses of heliostats under hail impacting. This study performs the dynamic response of heliostat under hail impacting in Tibetan Plateau of China by numerical simulation. A hail dynamic constitutive model considering strain rate effect and brittle fracture behavior was established and verified based on historical hail statistics, and the effects of hail impacting position, hail size, elevation angle and thickness of heliostat on the dynamic response characteristics were analyzed. The research results demonstrate that the impact position has a significant influence on the displacement of heliostat, but a little effect on the maximum stress. The stress and displacement of the heliostat increase with the increase of hail size, while decrease with the increase of the elevation angle and thickness of heliostat. When the hail diameter increases to 30 mm, the maximum principal stress of heliostat exceed its tensile strength. The results are useful and interesting to researchers who can reference the obtained results to predict the heliostat safety under hail impacting.