The curved roof criterion of Team Canada’s 2011 entry to the Solar Decathlon certainly presented a unique design challenge! Some of the early designs of the home actually had slope changes in the North-South direction as well as the East-West direction – thankfully, the project was simplified when the students settled on the current design. Simplified, but still not all that simple! We still had to work with angle changes from East to West and a significant cantilever of about 1.5m at the bottom East and West corners.
We originally floated the idea around of cold-rolling aluminum rails to mount the solar modules(aka panels) on. The rails would have been rolled to the same curve as the East-West angle change of the roof. We had to abandon this idea due to the large cantilevers at the bottom corners.
In the end, while working closely with the students, we decided to keep the rails running North-South with a custom designed hinged mounting system that would allow for the changing angles of the roof. Certain columns of modules spanned different angle changes than other columns – the hinged solution brought versatility and allowed for a universal solution across the entire roof.
We then worked closely with Schletter to spec an aluminum rail that could handle the large cantilever at the bottom of the array. The entire design was engineered to withstand the required wind and snow loads and point load requirements were checked against measured pull out strengths from TitanWall.
Voila – a curved array! Cool, eh?
