LightTools Solar Design Utilities

Solar Tracking Utility

This utility allows users to simulate and analyze the performance of a solar collection system. Features of this utility include:

• The ability to create both direct and diffuse solar source models to be used in analysis. Advanced source modeling includes the ability to simulate the solar aureole caused by the solar beam's interaction with atmospheric particles.
• The support of insolation data to simulate solar radiation for various geographies, times of year, and times of day. Users can directly input insolation data created using a global meteorological databases provided by METEOTEST's METEONORM software (www.meteonorm.com). User-defined insolation data files, created using other sources such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, are also supported.
• The creation of a solar cell receiver model.
• The ability to evaluate the amount of energy that strikes the solar collection system at a particular time of day.
• The ability to create a solar day scan to simulate the movement of the sun across the sky throughout the day and to calculate both the incident solar power and electrical power of the solar cell defined in your LightTools model.