Abstract
Computation of view factors is required in several building engineering applications where radiative exchange takes place between surfaces such as ground and vertical walls or ground and sloping thermal or photovoltaics collectors. In this paper, view factor computations are performed for bifacial solar photovoltaic (PV) collectors based on the finite element method (FEM) using two programming languages known as Microsoft Excel-Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Python. The aim is to determine the computer response time as well as the performance of the two languages in terms of accuracy and convergence of the numerical solution. To run the simulations in Python, an open source just-in-time (JIT) compiler called Numba was used and the same program was also run as a macro in VBA. It was observed that the simulation response time significantly decreased in Python when compared to VBA. This decrease in time was due to the increase in the total number of iterations from 400 million to 250 billion for a given case. Results demonstrated that Python was 71–180 times faster than VBA and, therefore, offers a better programming platform for the view factor analysis and modelling of bifacial solar PV where computation time is a significant modelling challenge.
Highlights
Buildings consume a great deal of energy to maintain comfortable conditions within their enclosures
We focused on the modelling of computationally intensive view factor analysis between reflecting and collecting surface and determined the duration of simulation response time
The existing work demonstrates the benefits of using Python for view factor analysis for solar PV applications, which is an improvement over our previous work where we used Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for such an analysis
Summary
Buildings consume a great deal of energy to maintain comfortable conditions within their enclosures. PVsolar [1], heat gain for daylighting studies [2], of the view factor to determine the diffused quantification of available façade areas for modelling installation of building integrated solar. There are different simulation approaches to determine the ground reflected radiation that is incident upon tilted bifacial solar photovoltaics (PV) such as the view factor model, the ray tracing model, and empirical modelling [9]. We have followed the view factor modelling-based approach to evaluate the radiative energy transfer between the ground (reflecting surface) and the bifacial solar PV (collecting surface). We focused on the modelling of computationally intensive view factor analysis between reflecting (ground) and collecting (bifacial solar PV) surface and determined the duration of simulation response time. To understand the in concept view factor modelling, let us consider two rectangular surfaces A1 and A2 with surface dimensions a
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