Lattice Boltzmann Method For Multiphysics Modeling And High Performance Computing Of Large-Scale Photovoltaic Systems

As a renewable clean energy,solar energy plays an important role in energy supply system.For power generation process of photovoltaic(PV)module,in addition to solar radiation intensity,factors such as ambient temperature,wind velocity and humidity will all have impacts on PV generation efficiency.In traditional PV power plant design and power generation estimation softwares,the spatial resolution of meteorological satellite data used is usually kilometer-level,while the spatial resolution of PV arrays composed of PV modules is meter-level.There is a large deviation in designing PV power station and predicting PV system power generation through the kilometer level meteorological data.Lattice Boltzmann method(LBM),with inherent parallelism,is used to realize the coupled multi-physics modeling of temperature,wind velocity and humidity and its three-dimensional(3D)multi-GPUs(graphic processing unit)parallel computing to obtain meter-level data of environmental temperature,wind velocity and humidity in large-scale PV arrays,which will greatly improve the accuracy of PV software.The main research contents and conclusions are as follows:(1)A 3D velocity field LBM multi-GPUs parallel algorithm is implemented,and the effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithm are verified by 3D lid-driven cavity flows.The algorithm was applied to simulate turbulent duct flows at different Reynolds numbers and cross-sectional aspect ratio,and the characters of duct flows such as secondary flows were captured,which verified the great parallel performance of the algorithm and the ability to capture complex flow field characteristics.(2)The temperature,velocity and humidity coupled multi-physics LBM was constructed by LBM with double distribution function,and the 3D multi-GPUs parallel algorithm of the coupled model was implemented.Natural convection in a closed square cavity,mass transfer between two plates,and natural convection with gas diffusion in a square cavity were conducted to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the coupled model and multi-GPUs parallel algorithm.(3)The multi-GPUs LBM parallel algorithm for multi-physical field was applied to simulate the physical field distributions of a single PV module at different inlet wind velocity,Rayleigh number Ra and Schmidt number Sc.Three points in the region were selected to quantitatively explore the influence of the inlet wind velocity,Ra and Sc on the multi-physical field distribution.Smagorinsky model was employed to correct the fluid viscosity of the coupling multi-physical field LBM,and about 630 million uniform grids were used to realize the simulation of multi-physical field distributions in 243.2 m×102.4 m×25.6 m PV system.Simulation results show that coupling multi-physical field LBM parallel algorithm is a potentially promising computational tool for engineering problems.