European multinational PVH (PVHardware), manufacturer of solar trackers and structures for photovoltaic plants, has focused its efforts during the last years in developing its technology to adapt it to extreme weather conditions. After its latest projects in Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the company has specialized in desert projects, where strong wind can be an adversity. Because of this, it was important to reduce the stow position time of the trackers as far as possible, to better protect the panels from this type of weather and to prevent possible damage.
“The time to stow position is decisive to prevent harm on the structures and to avoid aeroelastic instability incidents known as fluttering. The importance of this is even higher in projects located in desert areas, where wind speed suddenly changes in a matter of minutes”, states Emilio García, manager of PVH. “In addition, during the last two years our R&D department has focused on wind tunnel tests, which allow us to strengthen even further the protection against climate factors”. While the trackers by other providers usually take around twenty minutes to adopt stow position, Monoline is able to make it in fifty seconds.
The value of a clever alarm system
One of the main factors to achieve this progress is the alarm system designed by the company, which includes four pre-configured levels in relation to wind speed. Thanks to this clever system, the tracker is always as close as possible to the stow position, and is able to reduce Monoline‘s standard five minutes to fifty seconds. The other key element is the motor used by this solar tracker, which is notable because of its superior power and quality, and allows for a high-level performance with a minimal number of actuators.
The Monoline technology was first launched in 2015 in El Salvador, and is currently present in thirteen photovoltaic plants in Central America, United States, Mexico and Australia. It has also been successfully used at the Benban PV project in Egypt, where PVH is installing 800 MW with different versions of Monoline.
PVH is a provider of innovative solar tracking solutions for the global utility-scale solar market, including trackers, fixed structures and SCADA system. The company has an annual production capacity of 3.5 GW.
