Tutorials

This section will cover some tutorials to help the users easily get started with pvfactors. The notebooks used for this section are all located in the tutorials folder of the Github repository.

Note

The users may find it useful to first read the theory and mathematical formulation for Full simulations and Fast simulations to better understand the differences between the two approaches.

Getting started: running simulations

Here is a quick overview on how to get started and run irradiance simulations with pvfactors.

• Getting started

Details on the “full mode” simulations

In the “full mode”, pvfactors calculates the equilibrium of reflections between all surfaces of the PV array for each timestamp. So the system to solve is implicit (matrix inversion required).

pvfactors relies on “timeseries geometries” of the PV array, which are the attributes named ts_pvrows and ts_ground in OrderedPVArray, and which contain vectors of coordinates for all timestamps and for all geometry elements. Please take a look at the tutorial sections below for more details on this.

• PV Array geometry introduction
• Discretize PV row sides and indexing
• Calculate view factors
• Run full timeseries simulations
• Run full simulations in parallel
• Account for AOI reflection losses (in full mode only)

Details on the “fast mode” simulations

In the “fast mode”, pvfactors assumes that all incident irradiance values for the system are known except for the PV row back surfaces. So since the system to solve is now explicit (no matrix inversion needed), it runs a little bit faster than the full mode, but it is less accurate.

Note

Some tests show that for 8760 hourly simulations, the run time is less than 1 second for the fast mode vs. less than 2 seconds for the full mode.

• Run fast simulations