Paper Conference

Proceedings of BSO Conference 2016: Third Conference of IBPSA-England

     

Using Interpolation To Generate Hourly Annual Solar Potential Profiles For Complex Geometries

Christoph Waibel, Ralph Evins, Jan Carmeliet

Abstract: In order to evaluate the feasibility of roof and façade mounted or building integrated solar technologies such as photovoltaic and solar thermal panels, information on the solar potential availability under consideration of local conditions such as geometrical obstructions is required. Future sustainable urban energy systems will be characterised by multi-carrier systems, where the design and operation of conversion and storage technologies exploits synergies between technologies. This requires fundamentally different design methodologies, such as the ‘energy hub’ approach. In the architectural design process of buildings and cities, whether manual or with the aid of computational optimization techniques, it is typical to iterate and change designs many times. A fast but sufficiently accurate model to evaluate the solar potential is crucial in this process. This paper presents the first version of a new model, where an annual hourly solar profile for arbitrary geometry is generated based on weather data, basic equations for beam and diffuse irradiation on tilted surfaces, and interpolation methods. The novelty of this method is that the interpolation is only applied to the obstruction calculations, hence maintaining the full hourly fluctuations of the weather data. It is highlighted in which design and optimization approaches such a solar model is of interest. Results show a good fit of the general trends and of the total annual irradiation when comparing with EnergyPlus and Daysim.
Pages: 506 - 513
Paper:
bso2016_1059