Retrofitting building roofs with aerodynamic features and solar panels to reduce hurricane damage and enhance eco-friendly energy production

Abstract

Wind-induced negative pressure on roofs of low-rise buildings is a major source of losses and community disruption. Vortex suppression technologies may reduce wind loads on buildings; however, it is challenging to implement an effective strategy to reduce wind loads on roofs with minimal loads on the mitigation feature itself. In this paper, the performance of different aerodynamic mitigation features is investigated in a comparative study. The results show that solar panels are relatively effective in reducing wind-induced uplift forces on a flat roof. Compared with all mitigation features presented, the airfoil is the most effective in reducing uplift loads, with promises to proceeding research in this area. In addition, the study investigates wind impact on a gable roof building with different configurations of solar panels, to reduce wind-induced loads on the host building while maintaining a visually appealing installation to permit broad usage and application. Pressure coefficients on roofs and solar panels from both computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and laboratory experiments are compared. The study shows that the optimal roof/solar panel combination reduces wind loads on low-rise buildings, i.e. improves the performance, in addition to providing ecofriendly energy especially when power outage is expected.