Vertical glass panel in front of PV cell

[gugel88]

Is it possible to define a glass panel in the 3D scene which is positioned in front of the cell in vertical direction, while the cell has the "normal" tilt?

It surely will lead to a change in gain because of the modified relexion and so on.

[jammyc]

Perhaps you could approximate it with soiling factors if the whole array is "hidden" by glass? It's not perfect, for example the angle of incidence would not be taken into account, but better than nothing if you calculated a worst-case loss factor.

Older releases of PVsyst v6 used to allow you to specify most shading objects as "thin objects"; you could then set the thin object factor to an approppriate value that you had calculated which would then reduce the shadow effect accordingly. This allowed you to deal with glass parapets surrounding balconies and the like where only part of the array was affected. I am not sure that this was intended behaviour, however, and it seems that this was removed in recent releases with thin objects being restricted to objects which are, um, thin! For example, cables and handrails. You might try to get hold of an older release, but I doubt it would be supported and obviously more recent versions have had bugs fixed etc.

James

[André Mermoud]

I don't see how to simulate such a special configuration in PVsyst. I didn't foresee the possibility a defining a transparent object.

Defining thin objects are possible also with parallelepipeds, in any version. I didn't remove any possibility about this since it was implemented.

However this is not a good way: the "thin object" definition is really for taking the size of the object into account, for the electrical losses.

If you define a glass as a thing object, it will produce a 100% linear shading (as an opaque object).