Impact of wind speed on ventilation performance within a container installed with photovoltaic inverter

Abstract

PV inverter needs proper ventilation for reducing the heat dissipation of the electronic components. In this work, a container installed with PV inverter is considered with different configurations of cooling channels within the container for ventilation analysis. Typically, high capacity PV inverters are installed inside the container and therefore inverters, are not experiencing external wind effects and it depends on the configuration of cooling channels. In this work, the main cooling channel is located at the top of the inverter; inlet and outlet ventilation holes are located on the side of cross ventilation. They help in analyzing the cooling design, dependent on site specific wind flow direction of a container. Wind speeds and their directions can raise back pressures, which may be high enough to block the cooling air flow inside the channels. Reduction of cooling air flow reduces the fan capacity for dissipating the heat losses. In this study, cooling performance of outdoor container installed with PV inverter has been evaluated by using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with two separate commercial packages, ANSYS CFX and Mentor Graphics FloEFD. Full scale size PV inverter prototype model has been used for experimental testing using the facility of the Wind Driven Rain equipment testing of the Toptester Limited (Finland). CFD numerical simulation results have been validated by comparing with the measured/experimental results. Wind flow volume rate results investigations have shown the cooling flow drop consequently with the head wind strength and also it has displayed the axial fan saddle region effect on the volume flow. Both the measurements and CFD results have shown significant turbulence in the inlet vent region of the main cooling channel.