The performance of photovoltaic (PV) arrays are affected by the operating temperature, which is influenced by thermal losses to the ambient environment. The factors affecting thermal losses include wind speed, wind direction, and ambient temperature. The purpose of this work is to analyze how the aforementioned factors affect array efficiency, temperature, and heat transfer coefficient/thermal loss factor. Data on ambient and array temperatures, wind speed and direction, solar irradiance, and electrical output were collected from a PV array mounted on a CanmetENERGY facility in Varennes, Canada, and analyzed. The results were compared with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and existing results from PVsyst. The findings can be summarized into three points. First, ambient temperature and wind speed are important factors in determining PV performance, while wind direction seems to play a minor role. Second, CFD simulations found that temperature variation on the PV array surface is greater at lower wind speeds, and decreases at higher wind speeds. Lastly, an empirical correlation of heat transfer coefficient/thermal loss factor has been developed.

One direction in optimizing wind farm production is reducing wake interactions from upstream turbines. This can be done by optimizing turbine layout as well as optimizing turbine yaw and pitch angles. In particular, wake steering by optimizing yaw angles of wind turbines in farms has received significant attention in recent years. One of the challenges in yaw optimization is developing fast optimization algorithms which can find good solutions in real-time. In this work, we developed a random search algorithm to optimize yaw angles. Optimization was performed on a layout of 39 turbines in a 2 km by 2 km domain. Algorithm specific parameters were tuned for highest solution quality and lowest computational cost. Testing showed that this algorithm can find near-optimal (<1% of best known solutions) solutions consistently over multiple runs, and that quality solutions can be found under 200 iterations. Empirical results show that as wind farm density increases, the potential for yaw optimization increases significantly, and that quality solutions are likely to be plentiful and not unique.

Pitot tubes, when used in conjunction with a differential pressure transducer can provide accurate velocity measurement of airflow. It does this by measuring the pressure difference between the static pressure and the dynamic pressure of the incoming flow. These devices are widely used in a number of fluid measurements, including wind tunnel experiments, and their small aerodynamic