Abstract
In recent years there has been an increasing demand among home owners for cost effective sustainable energy production such as solar energy to provide heating and electricity. A lot of research has focused on the assessment of the incoming solar radiation on roof planes acquired by, e.g., Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). However, solar panels can also be mounted on building facades in order to increase renewable energy supply. Due to limited reflections of points from vertical walls, ALS data is not suitable to perform solar potential assessment of vertical building facades. This paper focuses on a new method for automatic solar radiation modeling of facades acquired by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) and uses the full 3D information of the point cloud for both the extraction of vertical walls covered by the survey and solar potential analysis. Furthermore, a new method isintroduced determining the interior and exterior face, respectively, of each detected wall in order to calculate its slope and aspect angles that are of crucial importance for solar potential assessment. Shadowing effects of nearby objects are considered by computing the 3D horizon of each point of a facade segment within the 3D point cloud.
Highlights
With the increasing and unstable prices of fossil fuels and the need to face the serious environmental and economic threats of climate change, renewable energy sources such as wind, biomass and solar energy must play a major role in the energy supply chain
In this paper the incoming solar energy on building facades extracted from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) data is assessed in order to find suitable places for the installation of solar panels and to increase renewable energy supply
The point cloud based solar radiation model uses the full information of the 3D point cloud for both solar potential assessment and modeling of shadowing effects of nearby objects
Summary
With the increasing and unstable prices of fossil fuels and the need to face the serious environmental and economic threats of climate change, renewable energy sources such as wind, biomass and solar energy must play a major role in the energy supply chain. This paper focuses on finding suitable places on building facades for the installation of solar panels by performing solar radiation modeling. Solar radiation modeling cannot be performed without having detailed information about the three dimensional representation of both the buildings of interest and their surrounding objects (e.g., vegetation, infrastructure etc.) that may cause shadowing effects. This paper aims at modeling the incoming solar radiation on building facades by using the 3D point cloud of MLS directly, i.e., an aggregation of the 3D point cloud to 2.5D raster cells is not required. The direct radiation is defined as the part of the incoming solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface directly without being reflected by the atmosphere. The diffuse radiation is reflected radiation reaching the Earth’s surface Both components are estimated by using formulas presented by Hofierka and Šúri [35]. If data from a meteorological ground station close to study area is available, it can be used to consider atmospheric as well as cloud cover effects by calculating the so called clear sky index (CSI) [37] as performed in e.g., Jochem et al [16] and Jochem et al [17]
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