near-shading with tracking, without 3D scene

[S.Faulkner]

Is it possible to set up near (self) shading calculation for a single-axis tracking system, without setting up a 3D shading scene? In other words like "unlimited sheds" for fixed tilt.

I am modelling a large system (tens of MW) and I am not familiar with setting up 3D scenes. I could set up just one 1MW block but it would still be a lot of trackers.

What is the easiest way to model the irradiance and electrical shading loss for a single axis tracking system with backtracking?

[S.Faulkner]

I think I've answered this myself. I see now that a 3D scene is required, and that it is not too hard to set up since the number of trackers can be entered. The limit of 400 means I can only model one inverter but I can easy scale the results.

The problem I now have is that there isn't any electrical shading loss, but I'll add to another post on that.

[André Mermoud]

OK, I was not aware of this limitation of 400 trackers, and I have increased this limit to 1000 sheds or trackers.

However such a number of trackers doesn't make much sense: if you have, say, 6m between trackers, this represent a width of the PV plant of 6 km.

If you want to increase it you can simply define different arrays.

Now if you have backtracking, it is quite normal that you don't have any electrical losses, as you don't have shading losses on the beam component (by definition of the backtracking strategy).

[n.ragavander]

How do you import a autocad file with the polygons so we can draw exactly to the map for the near shading analysis? is it possible to do this and if so it would be nice to have video that explains that. Thank you

[Stéphane]

Hi,

PVsyst supports several 3D file formats for import, namely *.DAE; *.3DS; *.H2P; *.PVC.

You can find information about these files and the process to import them in our online help:

- https://www.pvsyst.com/help/index.html?sketchup.htm

- https://www.pvsyst.com/help/index.html?helios_3d.htm

- https://www.pvsyst.com/help/pv-collada-file-format.htm

 

The first link above also explains how to convert AutoCAD files to *.DAE file using Sketchup.

I hope this helps.