Simulates insolation and shading on a curved solar array. Simulates flux to each individual cell, does string calculations including bypass diodes, and computes power output. Shows insolation, shading, and power output given a lat/lon/date/time, cell specification, and array specification.
I wrote this to help design the next Stanford solar car. However, it's a generic solar array simulator, and I hope it will be useful for many projects.
- Shellpower uses OpenGL for both input and simulation. You need a computer with decent graphics.
- Use Windows. Install Visual Studio. I strongly recommend VS C# 2010 Express Edition.
- Clone the repo. I recommend installing Cygwin, and then installing git via the Cygwin installer.
- Install OpenTK. It's in
dependencies/opentk.[...].exe - Open
src/ShellPower.sln. You may have to delete and re-add the OpenTK dependencies. (Solution Explorer > References) - Run Shellpower. It will load and display the example array. Click "Simulate" to run a simulation.
- A 3D model of the array. Plain triangle mesh, 3dxml or STL format. Dimension should be in mm or m, the +Y axis points upward, and the +Z axis points forward.
- A texture of the of array. Top down view, orthographic projection, no shading, no antialiasing, just black pixels for each cell and white pixels everywhere else.
- Latitude, longitude, date and time.
- Solar insolation (square-plate). Default: 1000 W/m^2
- Solar cell parameters. Default: the parameters for a Sunpower C60
There is an example model--Luminos, the 2013 Stanford Solar Car-that illustrates how the program works and how the inputs should be formatted.
- Total solar flux in W
- Computed array area in m^2 (useful for validating if your inputs are correct)
- Percent of array shaded
- Insolation at each cell
- Output power of each string (after stringing and bypass diode calculations)
- Output power of the array
The time-varying simulation is a work in progress. It simply repeats the instantaneous simulation over the course of a day.