Quality and sustainability - vertical bifacial solar panels
It's our ambition to offer the best product quality possible and to secure a sustainable product chain. Therefore, we want to uncover the potential challenges and risks by accelerated aging tests and materials stress simulations and minimize the environmental impacts through design, materials choice and designing for circularity and materials recovery at end-of-life.
Methods and main findings
Finite element methods
Simulations of mechanical load on the vertical PV structure is done to ensure they can withstand the strongest winds.
Field stress tests
No test is more convincing the placing the units outside in harsh weather while monitoring performance.
Life cycle assessment
Ensuring sustainability throughout our whole supply chain is an importan step in contributing to a future circular economy. One way to achieve this is a life cycle assessment.
Finite element modeling
To test whether the product can withstand mechanical loads from e.g. extreme wind loads, simulations to uncover mechanical strain are conducted. In particular, it needs to be ensured that critical parts of the structure, such as rivets and the substructure are dimensioned and designed optimally. These simulations are linked to CFD simulations which gives us realistic forces on each vertical PV panel for different wind conditions.
With permission from Fraunhofer ISE
Field stress tests
Our units are installed on rooftops, some of them exposed to strong weather conditions like this installation in Tromsø.
Our first pilot installation was installed in July 2021. Since then, we have not observed any failure or damage of the vertical units due to outdoor conditions.
Life cycle assessment
Even as we are providing a green energy technology, we need to ensure we work to minimize the carbon emissions during the whole product cycle - from cradle to grave. A tool to help us achieve minimal environmental impact is life cycle assessment (LCA). This helps us in selecting materials, improve the production chain and analyze recycling potential.
Building a solid LCA framework is important for Over Easy Solar to obtain various mandatory and voluntary sustainability certifications and comply with forthcoming regulations.
With permission from Fraunhofer ISE, reproduced from S. Herceg et al., “Chances and Challenges of PV LCA: Systems Boundaries & Impact Categories”, EcoPV Workshop, 2017
The product
Learn more about the VPV Unit from Over Easy Solar