Solar Carport Product

Overview

A solar carport turns parking area into generating area. A steel canopy spans the parking bays, and instead of a metal deck its roof is the photovoltaic array itself: glass-glass modules clamped edge to edge form both the generator and the weather skin. A typical commercial unit covers twelve bays with a 22 kWp array, feeds two String Inverters, and supplies four EV Charge Point points, so the cars parked beneath it can absorb the energy generated above them.

The defining structural problem is that the roof must shelter cars without columns standing where cars need to be. The standard answer is the cantilever: a single row of Canopy Columns between two parking rows, each column carrying a Cantilever Beam that projects 5–6 m over the bays with no front support. The price of the open span is load path severity — wind uplift on a 5° roof produces overturning moments that gravity never balances, which is why each Concrete Pier is a bored pile 2–3 m deep and the Anchor Bolt Cage uses M30 bolts. The foundation is sized by suction, not weight.

Structure

The frame is hot-dip galvanized S355 steel fabricated to EN 1090. Tapered cantilever beams put material where the bending moment is, deep at the column head and shallow at the tip. Roof Purlins of cold-formed Z200 section span between beams at roughly 1.1 m pitch, set to coincide with the clamping zones of the modules so the Mounting Rails load the purlins directly. A Bracing Set in the column line carries longitudinal wind, and every column foot is leveled on its Column Baseplate over a Grout Pad before the anchor nuts are torqued.

The array as a roof

Conventional rooftop PV sits above a waterproof roof; here the modules are the roof. Each PV Module is a glass-glass laminate — two sheets of 2 mm heat-strengthened Module Glass around a Cell Matrix of 144 half-cut cells in Encapsulant Sheet — chosen because the rear glass makes the laminate inherently watertight and lets the bifacial cells pick up a few percent of extra yield from light reflected off parked cars and pavement. The 20 mm gaps between module rows are closed with Inter-Module Seal strips so rain runs down the 5–10° slope into the Box Gutter rather than onto windshields. Drips are the most common customer complaint about carports, and the seal detail, not the electrical design, determines whether the canopy is perceived as working.

Each Module Clamp is torqued to about 12 N·m and carries serrations that pierce the anodizing of frame and rail, bonding the whole array to the Earthing Kit without separate ground lugs. The Rail Brackets include an isolating pad because aluminium rail on galvanized steel purlin is a galvanic couple that would otherwise corrode at every contact point.

Electrical system

Strings of 13–14 modules run at roughly 550–600 V into the DC Combiner Box and then to the inverters, each a transformerless 10 kW unit built around an IGBT Power Module bridge with a Power MOSFET boost stage and DSP control on its Microcontroller. The inverters hang on the shaded north face of the columns; their finned rear castings reject about 200 W of switching loss each by natural convection. A DC Disconnect Switch beside each inverter and Surge Arresters on both DC and AC sides complete the protection chain, with everything landing in the AC Distribution Board and passing the Grid Meter to the site supply.

EV charging integration

The four charge points are IEC 61851 Mode 3 units delivering up to 22 kW three-phase through a Type 2 Socket with a motorized plug lock. Each contains its own RCD Module with 6 mA DC fault detection — mandatory because a DC leak from a vehicle's onboard charger would otherwise blind the upstream RCD — and a MID-certified Energy Meter for billing. Sessions authorize through the RFID Reader against an OCPP backend.

The Dynamic Load Manager is what makes four 22 kW chargers viable on a 63 A connection. It reads the grid meter and the live PV output and reassigns per-charger current limits every few seconds over Modbus: on a sunny midday all four cars may charge largely on solar, while on a winter evening the manager throttles them so the site never exceeds its supply contract. Without dynamic load management the connection would need to be sized for the 88 kW worst case.

Rainwater and maintenance

Runoff from the sealed module roof collects in the box gutter behind a Leaf Screen, drops through Downpipes routed in the columns, and can feed a Rainwater Tank for irrigation or car washing. Monitoring runs on a logger built around a Compute SoC Module with an LTE uplink; a Irradiance Sensor in the module plane and module-temperature probes let the portal compute a performance ratio, typically 80–85%, and flag strings that underperform after soiling or a failed Module Junction Box diode.