/diy/ — DIY solar steel rack

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Detail for HSS horizontal rails

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Shop drawing for I beams

>>2994918 (OP)
wait a minute lol 30ft pole 24ft height perfectly planar construction so this is a wind up then?
anyway actually getting posts plumb and plane is easy, you put the two end posts in first, use a plumb to get them vertical.
now before you fix them in, run a string line between them.
use the string line to rotate the post so the string is flat to the face of the post
then with a string line top and bottom between two fixed posts, you can offer up all the intermediate posts to the string line before fixing them.
next: don't bury steel anything. concrete footers and then fix the steel to the concrete. unless you live in the desert. 24 ft is not to be fucked with. if you want i guess you could contract a piler to do it.

also solar panels usually are installed at an angle. i.e. pointed towards the sun.

>>2994922
Cheeky

>>2994964
Steel has to be embedded in the post in this case for bending moment resistance.

>angle

This is a winter array , we already have enough angle arrays for the summer

>>2994918 (OP)
Post the video when it flies away
Maybe put a GPS tracker on it

>>2994980
24" foundation piles will give a factor of safety of 2.1 for this design.

this is retarded on many different levels

but i think ill start with
what is the idea behind digging a hole and lifting the i beam and pouring concrete around it?

why not a pile driver, literally the machine made to pound I beams into the ground?

24 foot i beams are massive obviously this is not tied to anyones real world bottom line... is this going to charge a battery bank or are you thinking grid-tie.

i put in posts for multiple municipal projects before I decided living out of hotels sucked and I liked my hearing so I had to do something else. This is unreal

i dont think you have any idea what you are doing. you're an engineer in an unrelated field arent you?

>>2995271
Try driving piles in rocky clay that is full of boulders retard

>>2995286

Well, see thats the thing where i think youre the retard. If you have rocky clay, you dont use i beams.

to use i beams, early on the faggot ass engineers come out and do soil tests. lots of em all over. they calculate the liklihood of rejects. soil like you deacribe, if theres too many rocks that are too big you dont drive piles there.

likewise, if the ability of the ground doesn't support the lateral loads, i beams arent used. usually we were driving 12 to 18 foot posts about 6 to 10 feet in the ground. the depth you drive your i beam is determined by the site characteristics.


the process you drscribe has the bases of your i beams in entirely excavated, disturbed soil. this is not how i beams are installed in the real world as far as I know.

you're the retard. i cant imagine how much you are into the posts to be doing something so mind blowingly stupid.
you dont know what you dont know
you dlont know a lot about what you are trying to act like an expert on.

for the record, im not an expert either, i just am calling bullshit on you.

just get a fuckin generator

you are building a glass wall, i have not seen that before! i have seen a glass brick wall i think the largest is in japan about the height you are taking about, i would look into the window industry for tips, usa corning might have a more flexible glass for your solar panels they are experts at glass even if they did steal potassium doped glass from the soviet union.
my first thought was to use rubber on the connections because the glass is going to bow and pull at the connections so some give there like window glaze, but maybe solar panels have accounted for that because it is already in a frame.

>>2995329

its actually very close to incredibly common and conventional.

usually the bolt holes on the i beams have angled supports attached to them and then racking runs laterally post to post creating a surface to mount each panel. there's play in the racking, but only so much, so in order to leave the posts at the right height for the guys following you use the range the post can go into the ground to accound for elevation and smooth out as much of that as you can

i beams are supposed to be driven into undisturbed ground for there to be any engineering in the foundation's lateral strength

unless this is naturally very well hidden from the elements, its just gonna tip over. guy is worried about 6 feet of i beam in the ground bending so hes putting em in concrete?


the idea that 24 feet of i beam is gonna bend the last 6 feet not tip over with a 90 foot wide array on it?
this is insane

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>>2995336
dumb nigga

>>2995336
I might increase pile depth to 10ft or add some rear support frames

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OP here

So, I have tried a bunch of structural tricks and the forces are just so huge that it is very difficult to get away from 10 ft (!) deep foundations . Sorry that I couldn't tell you this sooner but I'm not a structural engineer. Drilled, and driven foundations are difficult to do reliably in bouldery soil like mine which leaves only excavated foundations as an option. Which would be quite difficult to construct because you will have to dig it as narrow as possible 10 feet down and then put a man down there and mechanically pack gravel around the concrete. I guess it's possible but extremely hazardous and perhaps not practically constructible. The other option would be to use an air drill crane to drill right through any boulders and insert steel casings into the ground and then fill those with concrete but that would be $2-3k per pile.

With the extreme bending forces due to wind, The only way to get away from extremely deep foundations is to add rear framing of some sort. Even with a brace that connects halfway up and ties back to the rear you still need piles 8ft deep at the main columns and 5ft deep at the rear supports.

So maybe what is really needed is a "portal frame" to distribute loads axially into the ground the way a house would instead of trying to use moment resistance. Which brings up that old chestnut of why don't I use the wall of a building instead of trying to make a free standing bill board structure. Especially since I already have the south face of a main building accessible, and we are also proposing construction of a new storage / tractor garage building.

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>>2995361
Arere~, where did safety factor 2.1 go?

Here's the thing you absolute baka ass nigga, you're making this overcomplicated, structurally very unsound plan for no actual reason. If you just stand up the panels (long side vertical), the exact same panel count would fit into twice the width and reduce peak loads you're dealing with by a good 80%. The higher you make the thing and longer the beans, the larger the lever action on the base. You could just slap some 4" square profiles between each panel, either concrete them in ~1m or brace them with a rear brace with shallower concrete, and you have something extremely solid. Instead you're making a retardo sail that will cost a LOT and won't hold for shit.

>>2995367

>Arere~, where did safety factor 2.1 go?
I found out you can't use the top 1.2 m of soil for Brohms analysis in my area because of frost action which makes the necessary foundation depth 10ft instead of 6 ft . That's not really possible to construct safely so I have to look at other options.

Goal is 30kw of vertical solar so I'm going thru design iterations to see if I can try to achieve this.

I already looked at the rear bracing design as well but the moment resistance required is still so fuck huge that you still need 8ft deep piles at the front and 5ft piles at the back. The most practical way to get so much south facing exposure is actually to stick the panels on the south side of a building which distributes loads differently .

>>2995361

Ballast blocks as foundations, and then cables like a radio tower with tension to as nasty of anchor points as you can figure out how to do.


Additionally, its unclear how you would have gotten 30 foot i beams to stay exactly plumb while your concrete sets. Gonna rent 10 cranes? if you try and use anything with hydraulics to hold it in place (exvavator) theyre gonna droop before your concrete sets.

just so you're aware of how many levels it was immediately obvious you have no clue.

Addionally, no, drilled foundations are incredibly easy to do in rocky soil. The thing you dont know that you dont know is you take a thing called a ROCK DRILL and you drill a hole and you set your post ib the drilled hole.

actually its easier to make gorgeous lines of posts this way, because when you are twisting screw piles into ugly ground that doesnt need drilling they walk all over the place on you, like trying to drill a wood screw next to a knot

>>2995384

30kw of vertical solar
whos fuckin money is this, what the hell.

buy a generator or adjust your power needs. what the hell are you powering where you're the most qualified person to be coming up with these plans and whos money is it?

>>2995384
Just don't make it so tall. Unless your property is exactly 90' wide, there's no reason not to make it 2-3x wider and way less tall. That height is what's killing it.
>>2995386
30kW of solar panels isn't that expensive, in bulk it's like $5-7k. It's all the other shit around it that gets expensive, i.e. supporting structures. There definitely is a point where it's cheaper and more efficient to run a diesel or LNG generator.

>>2995385
>Additionally, its unclear how you would have gotten 30 foot i beams to stay exactly plumb while your concrete sets. Gonna rent 10 cranes? if you try and use anything with hydraulics to hold it in place (exvavator) theyre gonna droop before your concrete sets.

Wooden staked bracing frames was the plan. While the horizontal rails would bolt across and suck the I beams into plane. I have used similar bracing systems with wooden poles with no issues

>>2995387
The property is fairly hilly and forested . I don't have many areas around that are both flat and sun exposed . The verticality of the wall is because of snow. We have discovered over many years experience that angled solar is worthless in the winter because you have to clear a foot of snow off the panels every day and it's infeasible to do

>>2995387
>Generator
That would be my preference too but I'm not in charge of this operation.

>>2995361
You could make each vertical section of panels it's own structure so you have 2 or 3 or 4 walls of increasing height so no one wall has this huge load.

>>2995407
That doesn't make sense to me anon , you'd have to draw me a picture of what you mean

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>>2995408

>>2995412
Ahh.. So. I will run the structural numbers on that. It might get expensive with all the additional steel but it could still be worth it

>>2995413
You might save some on footing depth too

>>2995412
I ran the calculation. I still need 8ft pilings in this case , even if all the solar panels are only 5ft up. So I'd need 4 times as many pilings almost as deep, this option doesn't really work either unfortunately.

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>>2995417
A portal framed "shed" still seems to be the way to go because the structure changes from a cantilever to an axial load situation.

>>2995420
seems like a bit of a waste to me. triangles are strong.
>>2995367
are you avoiding this because you want a vertical pile? the shorter you make that back post to overhead angle the better.

have you considered using the clear space below the panel for an additional front brace?

if you can afford the shadow then suggest you check out how antenna masts are supported, a few steel ropes at various heights. some of them aren't even fixed at the bottom of the mast, they are free to move on a ball joint for wind loading.

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>>2995458
If I do the triangle thing it's slightly cheaper than the "portal frame"idea but I don't get a free building skeleton out of it

>>2995458
I looked into guy wires and it seems like too much of a pain in the ass . Just a tension meter for aircraft cable costs thousands of dollars. Plus the cables would shade the solar cells a bit.

>>2995405

As suspected
this is not your bottom line

i cannot believe the retardation of this world.
this is the blind leading the blind

fuck this gay earth

>>2995387

Correct. till you involve 10 30 foot i beams, and the machinery and crews to install them as op describes. because hitting panels with a snow rake is hard.

this whole thing could be done for the price of the i beams and delivery, but the sad truth is the sky doesn't give you shit for power the third week in january like it does in july if you are north of the 45th parallel.

its not a shovelling and clearing panels issue, op is literally just retarded.

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Ok , here's a newer better design. Any critiques?

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>>2995525
>Any critiques?
yah
y r u using random faggots on an eastern kazak reed intertwining imageboard to do your fucking job of engr consulting work?

>>2995530
I'm not an engineer consultant , I'm just a 4chan frog

Studies have proven that panels laying flat but elevated on cloudy and winter days have the best production result when using bifacial panels.

Just do that if you only plan on relying on these in winter otherwise you will need to adjust the angle. Vertical only works best facing south on clear days in winter

>>2995532
Snow would just cover and ice them up if you laid em flat nigga

>>2995405
>I don't have many areas around that are both flat and sun exposed
I'd still try to distribute it in your place. It doesn't even have to be flat if you are only working with single panel height, you can make groups of 3-5 panels with varied height.
>>2995525
Certainly better chance of not flying away than before.

>>2995525

Yes. The ballast bock should run perpedicular to the array, both supports tie into either end you absolute nincompoop

its simulating a post supporting the two by floating on the surface, not being a wildly heavy expensive support independent of the frost line

what. the. fuck.

generator.

>>2995650
>The ballast bock should run perpedicular to the array, both supports tie into either end you absolute nincompoop
?????????