Abstract
Estimations of the solar potential from the building design files may affect placement considerations in favor of more sunlight reception that reduces the energy costs and saves the environment. In this study, a GPU based system (GPU-DSRM) is proposed to estimate direct and diffuse solar radiation aggregated on 3D structures at urban or individual scale. In the proposed approach, finite element method, back-face detection and ray-tracing algorithms are customized to run in parallel to reduce the execution time. Thus, real-time shadow analysis with adjustable sampling rate and time scale can be performed without compromising precision and accuracy of the estimations. The most important novel aspect of the study is that it can be used anywhere in the world without the need for meteorological data. Some of the test results obtained from a site with 10 buildings are presented in this paper that shows a speedup value of 45 with the new GPU-based implementation compared to the CPU-based model. The GPU-DSRM tool has also been compared with geometric tools in the literature. Solar energy potential analysis of building designs or existing urban formations can be completed faster and more precisely with this new approach.
Highlights
NOMENCLATURE α Hourly elevation angle β Slope δ Declination angle ω Hour angle θ The angle between the normal of the sloped surface and the direction of the sun
A geometric based solar potential analysis tool development study was carried out in accordance with the following objectives: 1) The tool must be able to analyze solar potential for any part of the world, 2) it must take into account all building surfaces either in design phase or completed, 3) it must do dynamic shading analysis, 4) it must produce high precision and accurate results, 5) it must complete the analysis in a reasonable time
Compute Unified Device Algorithm (CUDA) is a parallel computing platform and software programming model developed by NVIDIA to utilize Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) architecture for high performance problems
Summary
Solar potential estimation becomes an iterative process when optimal position and facade forms are searched for a building This may require many trials to obtain the best home design parameters, and when the problem becomes urban size, radiation analysis may take weeks to get the results [8]. High performance computers and appropriate algorithms are needed to obtain the results in shorter time Based on these shortcomings, a geometric based solar potential analysis tool development study was carried out in accordance with the following objectives: 1) The tool must be able to analyze solar potential for any part of the world (no meteorological data is needed), 2) it must take into account all building surfaces either in design phase or completed, 3) it must do dynamic shading analysis, 4) it must produce high precision and accurate results (by dividing surfaces into smaller pieces and dynamic sampling), 5) it must complete the analysis in a reasonable time. The tool developed in this study is targeting urban planners, architects, civil engineers, energy investors and even individuals
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