With my installation on a terrain, I have multiple orientations

[André Mermoud]

When you follow a terrain with your tables of modules (i.e. when you incline the base of your modules), the real orientation of the plane of array changes. This is especially the case with scenes imported from the Helios3D software.

See With sheds on a tilted roof, PVsyst changes my orientations.

Average orientation

Therefore, when you distribute your tables on a hill, each table will have its own orientation depending on the slope of its basis, so that you will have a distribution of orientations.

This may result in an error "You have defined fields with XX different orientations, you cannot define more than 8".

You can analyze this distribution in the menu of the 3D scène, "View > Orientation Analysis".

For such a situation, PVsyst will use the average orientation of this distribution for the simulation. However there is a limit for reasonably considering all these orientation as a distribution.

This limit is specified for your project, using the button "Albedo & Settings" or "Project's settings", page "Other limitations". For getting one only average orientation, you can increase this limit, at the price of a slight loss of accuracy.

Several Average rientations

Now with Helios3D scenes (and any scene on a hill) PVsyst defines only one "average" orientation for the GlobInc irradiance.

Defining 2 different "average poles" orientations for improving the accuracy of the calculation would be very difficult, as:

- how to define these 2 orientations (which are the result of a calculation from table orientations),

- inversely, which "average pole" should be attributed to a given table ?

- the tables will be "mixed" on the hill. Some tables belonging to one average pole, others to the other. How to manage this and attribute them to a given sub-array ?

However with scenes where 2 "nominal" azimuths are clearly identified, we could indeed define 2 different averages and associate the corresponding table to each nominal orientation.This is the case for example for dome systems with opposite orientations. It is not possible to treat such systems in the present time, but we will develop this in a next version.